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SA enterprise gets innovative with IOT


Johannesburg, 07 Nov 2016
Melao Mashale, Senior Manager: IOT solutions at MTN Business.
Melao Mashale, Senior Manager: IOT solutions at MTN Business.

South African organisations across a broad range of industry verticals are moving quickly to innovate in the Internet of things (IOT) space, says MTN Business.

Melao Mashale, Senior Manager: IOT solutions at MTN Business, reports that his division, established out of the enterprise mobility business unit as recently as May last year to meet growing local demand, is working with a number of clients and several IOT solution providers on innovative IOT pilot projects in South Africa.

"IOT is an exciting field, and there is no industry vertical where it can't add value," he says.

Insurance is one local sector that has embraced IOT, he notes. "IOT sensors don't just enable tracking and recovery, but can also enable driver behaviour and vehicle usage monitoring, so insurance companies can lower risk and offer better premiums to careful drivers," says Mashale. For transport companies, there are significant risk and cost reduction benefits in knowing exactly how drivers behave when on the road.

In mining, IOT solutions stand to reduce losses, manage assets and improve safety. In agriculture, IOT solutions can be implemented for fire risk monitoring and alerts. "You might track rainfall patterns and temperatures and incorporate historical data to determine the current fire risk in an area, for example, then issue alerts when the risk of fires is high," Mashale says. "Meanwhile, game farms and public sector are looking to IOT to support conservation and combat poaching." He notes that the real promise of IOT lies beyond tracking endpoints, in applying advanced analytics to this data to support forecasting.

An application proving exceptionally promising at this stage is IOT-based goods in transit solutions that not only track where goods are, but secure containers against tampering and only allow for containers to be opened when at the correct geolocation and when accessed with the authorised password.

MTN's new Pan-African IOT platform, which was officially launched last year, is designed to support IOT and machine to machine (M2M) systems across the continent.

The platform, designed to support a vast IOT ecosystem, with application and management layers, is built on top of MTN's existing MPLS networks, capable of supporting massive numbers of IOT endpoints.

"MTN has positioned itself as the core of South Africa's evolving IOT environment, so that both public and private sector can build these new ecosystems on the back of our advanced, extensive and reliable pan-African infrastructure," says Mashale. "We are currently working with various IOT solution providers to build IOT systems that answer specific local needs within local constraints," he says.

In line with this focus on bringing locally relevant IOT solutions to market, MTN's Mind2Machine challenge encourages local developers to innovate in this space. At the next Mind2Machine awards early next year, South African enterprises will have an opportunity to review a range of MTN Business IOT solutions and pilot projects, says Mashale.

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