Soracom Expands Generative AI Capabilities for IoT Connectivity Solutions

Let’s talk about Soracom, Inc., especially given its news breaking this morning.

Soracom is a premier global provider of smart IoT connectivity. Founded in 2015 with a mission to accelerate global connections, Soracom’s full suite of tools help businesses accelerate deployments and succeed at scale. In addition, Soracom’s virtualized global platform provides full mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) capability, as well as a “single pane of glass” management resource for connectivity options for LPWA, Wi-Fi and satellite. (Plus, zero-touch provisioning services and more.) So whether a business is launching new initiatives or hardening million-scale deployments, they can count on Soracom’s expert support.

We also covered Soracom-related news earlier this year; after being named a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Managed IoT Connectivity Services, Worldwide, Soracom launched (in joint development with UnaBiz) an LTE (News - Alert)-M-based multi-purpose, configurable smart button for IoT. Soracom later announced an industrial-grade SIM card for its portfolio of eSIM and IoT SIM solutions, too.

And today, Soracom’s announcement tackles another hot technology:

Generative AI.

Soracom is officially announcing three new services designed to help IoT deployments, per Soracom, “take real advantage of the power and promise of generative AI.” Services in question, respectively named Soracom Query, Soracom Relay and Soracom Harvest Data Intelligence, are able to work together (or separately) to analyze IoT data on the fly and connect devices to powerful AI/ML insights and capabilities that have been made available through leading hyperscale platforms.

About each service:

• Soracom Query lets customers use structured query language (SQL) queries (i.e. from BI tools or CLI) to mine IoT device data with zero need to go and set up new servers or storage. This managed data warehouse capability – with automatic data loading – makes it easy to run complex analytical queries on more sizeable IoT datasets and easily feed the results to ML projects.
   
• Soracom Relay lets customers use any existing RTSP/RTP-compatible camera to acquire and securely transmit audio and video data to Soracom’s Harvest Files for storage or to a cloud destination, such as AWS S3 or Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, for computer vision and video analytics.
   
• Soracom Harvest Data Intelligence, now available in public beta, enhances the existing Soracom serverless data storage and visualization capability with the new ability to apply generative AI to analyze time series data and identify trends, patterns, outliers and abnormalities.

Here’s an example of how these services can, as mentioned, work together: Let’s say a municipality uses Soracom Relay to monitor road traffic. While doing so, Harvest Data Intelligence analyzes the data that is stored, and Soracom Relay can guide necessary decision-making on the best times to then schedule road repairs. It can also predict how changes in traffic patterns may impact existing infrastructure, and what actions might need to be taken from there.

Notably (and adding to this overarching AI endeavor), Soracom has also taken an extra step in establishing an “IoT x GenAI Lab” with Matsuo Institute, Inc.

This lab is set to explore more insights from diverse IoT data and generative AI, as well as develop new products and provide a bevy of other professional services.

Per Soracom’s co-founder and CTO, Kenta Yasukawa:

“Applying GenAI to analyze IoT data holds promise for us discovering insights that are currently beyond our imagination. As a technology partner to the companies building tomorrow’s connected experiences, we remain committed to delivering leading-edge capabilities that accelerate their innovation and help them succeed at scale and stay one step ahead in an ever-changing world.”