Telecom Italia subsidiary Sparkle has launched a global service to help companies that operate across borders maintain IoT connectivity.

Sparkle claims to be the first international service provider in Italy and among the top global operators. It launched the IoT Global service during a meeting this week at Expo 2020 Dubai’s Italy pavilion.

Sparkle chooses Dubai to present its enterprise digital offering because of its long-standing presence in the region and a record in 5G roaming between Europe and the Middle East.

Connectivity plays a key role for the success of IoT projects for companies operating internationally, with offices abroad or assets on the move, ensuring transmission of data between geographically distributed M2M devices and the cloud environment that hosts the applications. With the advent of 5G mobile networks and the latest M2M SIMs, latency is more crucial to guarantee timely information and precision in business processes.

IoT Global is a managed IoT connectivity service allowing companies to control their assets across multiple countries and with a seamless user experience. It is based on the use of global M2M SIMs capable of connecting to any cellular network, which means multinational companies don’t have to activate any service with local operators.

In addition, thanks to its virtualised and cloud-native mobile network infrastructure distributed on all continents and roaming agreements with more than 500 mobile operators around the world, Sparkle offers high-performance connectivity on a global scale with low latency, making its IoT offering particularly suitable for applications requiring real-time control.

IoT Global enriches Sparkle’s portfolio of enterprise digital offerings including MPLS, Ethernet, managed SD-WAN, cloud connect and multi-cloud automation services, all aimed at connecting enterprises’ international sites and manage communications both within their internal premises and with their external ecosystems.

Through the platform and its expertise, Sparkle aims to support companies along the entire value chain from global connectivity through SIM and eSIM cards, to device and vertical applications, by providing the following elements:

• Mobile core network in the cloud to provide connectivity across multiple countries with low latency for addressing the different needs of any vertical IoT use cases
• A connectivity management platform for administration and operational management for provisioning capabilities, inventory management, incident and problem management, and network performance. The portal enables data presentment, business intelligence reporting and analytics to monitor real-time consumption and asset status
• Intelligent SIM to provision and manage remotely the Sparkle profiles into user M2M devices and assets
• Device and application management to simplify the extraction of data from devices and machines, transmit those data efficiently over a network, and convert them into a form that is easily consumable by an IoT application to drive decision making

The global SIM lets the user connect to any cellular network without the need of physically SIM change. The service provides visibility and control of IoT devices, wherever deployed, within Sparkle’s global footprint. A flexible service management web portal can manage all SIMs.