How does a multi-tenant, multi-tier CMP support the value chain of any industry vertical?

Leveraging the multi-tier Connectivity Management Platform (CMP) to streamline your value proposition

Flexible data connectivity has become key to delivering streamlined and seamless service across various sectors. For instance, in the retail world of payment terminals, you’ll find terminal manufacturers, independent service operators (ISOs), and merchants all working together. Fleet management follows a similar pattern, with equipment manufacturers, system integrators, and fleet managers coordinating global shipping logistics. And let’s not forget the mobile network operators (MNOs) who often partner with MVNOs to reach large enterprises indirectly.

All these businesses face their own unique needs and challenges. While MNOs and MVNOs want to offer their clients customized connectivity plans and real time data usage visibility, chipset manufacturers and retail merchants need a connectivity infrastructure that reflects their individual business model and internal operations. 

Oftentimes, the mainstream solution would be to deploy individual instances of their connectivity management platform (CMP) for every new client, collaborator or business unit they want to onboard. This makes for a complex infrastructure that’s hard to manage or scale. 

There’s an alternative, much simpler, approach which can make launching and maintaining a CMP account very easy—connectivity sub-accounts. If you’re using a multi-tenant, multi-tier CMP, you can launch a sub-account for every new customer or business unit from your own CMP and manage them from a central place. Each sub-account can have their own structure, users, data allowance and billing plan. Let’s look at the benefits each link in your value chain can gain from implementing sub-accounts in their business.

How Can Sub-accounts Help Your Business? 

While your CMP gives you a centralized view of your operations, your sub-accounts allow you to organize your connectivity based on what makes sense for your business. Say, for instance, you  want to enter a new region or launch a new service. Instead of launching a new connectivity instance with its own passwords and usernames, you can launch a sub-account and manage them all from a single CMP. You can do this for onboarding new clients as well, where they get their own login details and create their own permissions downstream. 

The most effective way to split your accounts and organize your CMP will depend on your business type and individual needs:

Mobile Operators Supplying Data Connectivity

As an MNO, your goal is to give your customers the best connectivity solution for their needs. This means offering them quick deployment, responsive troubleshooting and real-time visibility over their usage. A centralized CMP offers all of that and gives them the same insights into their connectivity that you as an MNO have. They will have the option to launch further sub-accounts, to further split their usage by department, region or product and keep a clear view of their overall operations. 

Say you’re a mobile operator who’s selling connectivity to automotive manufacturers across five main regions. Rather than launching a unique instance for every new automotive customer you have, you can give them a white labeled sub-account from the same connectivity system and manage all of them from a single place. Not only does this give you a better overview of your business, but it also frees up your resources as a network provider. 

Your clients will be able to further split each white labeled sub-account to more child accounts on their end, making the whole connectivity solution much more organized and transparent. For example, your automotive client may decide to split their CMP account into further accounts per department or per region. They can then manage their access permissions to make sure that lower-tiered accounts don’t have access to information from other accounts.

Finally, having the capacity to split your accounts downstream gives you the opportunity to also sell wholesale to MVNOs who can further resell your services to their clients. 

IoT MVNOs

IoT MVNOs can have different levels of involvement when it comes to reselling connectivity. Depending on your size, you can decide to only look at the connectivity plans and leave the network’s infrastructure management to your MNO, or you can decide to keep full control over the connectivity solution. Either way, you can make use of sub-accounts to better manage your offers according to your size:

• Startups – as a new MVNO who’s just launched, you don’t have the resources to run your own connectivity management platform (CMP). A third party cloud based solution is perfect for getting you up and running quickly. You will benefit from sub-accounts by giving your clients more control over their solution while keeping full overview of their usage;
  
• Mid-tier MVNOs have the revenue and complexity that requires more than an out-of-the-box CMP. However, you may still not have the bandwidth to incorporate your own infrastructure in your operations and may still rely on a third-party CMP. That said, you don’t have to be limited by its functionality. Instead, you can use API to enhance its hierarchy capabilities, giving your clients more flexibility and control;
  
• Heavy – as an established MVNO, you’ve built an infrastructure tailored to your specific needs.You can still use  API to embed  hierarchy capabilities and make your system more flexible. This means that your customers can still use your core system, but benefit from sub-accounts you’ve incorporated via the API. .

This way, you retain full control over your connectivity structure regardless of your scale or growth. You can also share this control downstream so that you customers have the same visibility of their usage as you do.

Large Manufacturers of Connected Devices

Enterprises are yet to leverage centralized CMP for their internal operations and the offers they provide to their external clients. To date, for instance, enterprises have relied on disjointed accounts to connect each of their business units or regions in which they operate. The result? Dozens or hundreds of disjointed logins and unsynced data on data consumption and connectivity performance.

A centralized CMP which can be split into several tiers of sub-accounts can help you stand out in a competitive market and save on costs via the economies of scale. If you’re an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of  smart kitchen appliances like dishwashers, ovens and refrigerators, you may not want to offer connectivity solutions because it can be a nightmare to manage this across several regions. But, what if you could easily do this from a single CMP? What if you could give your distributors their own sub-account to manage or resell connectivity downstream?

Not only will you be making money from reselling connectivity, but you’d be able to better support them in using your products and stand out as a supplier.

Getting Started

The rise of smart devices and the reliance on connectivity across industries only emphasizes the need for a simple and streamlined way to manage our connectivity solutions. Whether you’re an MNO or MVNO who’s selling connectivity or an enterprise that uses complex connectivity solutions across your various business units, using a centralized CMP that can be split into individual sub-accounts can make all the difference in how effective and affordable your connectivity is.

If you want to find out more about how you can make use of sub-accounts within your own business, please get in touch and our team at floLIVE will be happy to help!