Let’s talk about Soracom.
Soracom is an advanced IoT services provider. In 2023, the company had its hands full, so to speak. We covered a variety of Soracom-centric news on our sites; these stories included:
- Plan X3-EU cellular IoT data bundle, starting at €4.50 for 25MB/month
- Achieving Visionary status, courtesy of a Gartner 2023 evaluation
- Plan-US for IoT, in partnership with UScellular
Notably, Soracom was also a Silver sponsor of IoT Evolution Expo 2024, part of the ITEXPO #TECHSUPERSHOW experience which took place from February 13-15 at the Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down and speak with Kenta Yasukawa, co-founder and CTO of Soracom. We discussed the company’s goals and additional IoT-centric topics at length.
Below are a few highlights from our conversation:
IoT Evolution World has featured a lot of Soracom-related coverage, particularly last year. What can you tell us about your background that we haven’t already shared with our readers?
So, I started my career in research. After some time, I joined Amazon Web Services (AWS). I have always been fascinated by the Internet of Things, and eventually became involved in connected home and IT projects. I’ve always been thinking about how things are connected to the cloud so they can become more intelligent, and from there I’ve remained curious about the cloud and the various devices in professional fields.
One day, I spoke with Ken Tamagawa (who would become Soracom’s CEO) about building our telecom infrastructure on top of the cloud so we could achieve an infinitely scalable connectivity infrastructure in addition to the value of our existing services.
The goal then became to securely connect every device – even hardware (with its many intricacies and heavy-lifting requirements) to the cloud side of things. Connecting with cloud-agnostic mindsets first would allow us to enable things in IoT that weren’t previously achievable.
That was back in 2014. Now, our platform is being built up as a smart IoT connectivity platform that enables productivity en masse.
That’s excellent. So with that history in mind, what’s on your mind now in terms of Soracom?
Well as we know, everything in IoT is built with reliable connectivity in mind. At Soracom, we are focusing on making smart connections more accessible, as well as smarter IoT device design, development and manufacturing needs, IoT eBook resources, and more.
Through the capabilities of our IoT platform, we always want to make certain that our customers are well educated on hardware design, total cost of ownership, prototyping possibilities, and everything else that goes into deploying IoT devices without issue. Even after launch, we want to make sure we meet customers’ needs. IoT environments must be customizable, and services must be unique so challenges can be taken care of before issues arise.
What sorts of additional challenges and IoT stresses can Soracom help alleviate for customers?
Well, there are credentials and certificates to worry about, international manufacturing requirements, hardware upkeep, eSIMs and iSIM needs, device security, and so on. Managing all of that can be both confusing and daunting, so we want to equip customers with powerful IoT tools that can be designed more intelligently and used faster
For more great information about Soracom, read here.
Edited by
Alex Passett
