In recent years the marketplace for Connectivity Management Platforms (CMPs) has evolved significantly. Ten or so years ago, a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) could be expected to single-source a preferred CMP solution to support their newly contracted IoT connections. Typically, such functionality was either developed in-house (as Vodafone did with its Global Data Service Platform, or GDSP) or procured from a third-party vendor, usually either Jasper (since acquired by Cisco and now offered as Cisco IoT Control Center) or Ericsson’s Device Connection Platform (since rebranded as IoT Accelerator and acquired by Aeris). There were a smattering of different approaches, such as Telekom Austria selecting a solution from Comarch and Verizon establishing a CMP joint venture with Qualcomm (nPhase) before then acquiring full control to bring the platform in-house, but the market was generally fairly concentrated.
Over the last decade, the IoT market and technology both have developed so that it has become far more viable for a single MNO to integrate with multiple CMPs, either to support their own IoT connections or to support connections sold by a third party and delivered on their network. A critical development has been the advent of cloud-hosted dedicated core networks for IoT which has made the deployment of such capabilities both cheaper and easier to achieve.
In this report, we provide a quick overview of the key functions of a CMP and a selection of leading players in the market, before analysing in detail the benefits of deploying a dedicated core alongside a CMP and also CMP abstraction.
