Reliance ADA Group founded Unlimit as the first comprehensive IoT offering for the Indian market. Jürgen Hase, CEO, Unlimit, highlights how the company has successfully built an ecosystem of more than 400 partners and why he considers a good channel partner to be a co-creator, co-innovator, and sometimes, a co-investor for startups
Unlimit, the only dedicated IoT business unit in India, was launched in 2016. It is spearheaded by Jürgen Hase, CEO, and his team who have an in-depth knowledge of the Indian market. The company has a wide ranging end-to-end IoT offering. “In just two years we have built the first comprehensive IoT offering for the India market right from managed connectivity to device management and application platform to any form of analytics. Unlimit has the best in class partner ecosystem for the India market,” says Hase.
Unlimit has successfully built an ecosystem of 400+ partners comprising of domain experts, technology evangelist, and system integrators. “End-to-end IoT based products and solutions not only requires extensive consultancy and customised solutioning, but also sector specific devices and sensors. We leverage our partner network and work on a sell through model for the same. Traditional distribution networks will not work in this case,” points out Hase, adding that some of the marketing interventions for channel comprises of-Trade marketing which includes incentivising and running contest for partners BTL campaigns for launching products/solutions at partners end
Hase believes that for any startup, expansion of knowledge resources and sector specific hardware requirements will always be a challenge during the growth phase. Right channel partner’s existing network can play an important role in that case. “With the right set of partners, we can leverage their sales and distribution network as well as extensive range of hardware devices and sensors to help us navigate and expand our company to the next level. Partners’ continuous engagement with the market in their specific domain provides good market insights that can be mutually beneficial for both companies to solve customer pain points and expand respective business,” he asserts, reminding that a good channel partner should be treated as a valuable co-creator, co-innovator and in certain cases a co- investor.
Solutions offered
The solutions and services offered by Unlimit are the following –
Unlimit Control: An IoT platform for managed connectivity. Unlimit Control efficiently manages the enterprise centrally by automating the operations, controlling the data consumption, and reducing the overall cost.
Unlimit Enablement allows enterprises and consumers to deploy and integrate a variety of IoT sensors and devices over the wireless network. It simplifies the management and storage of asset data and has a built-in functionality to constantly monitor and diagnose device availability.
Unlimit Insights helps anticipate and pre-empt disruptions, detect liabilities and mitigate risk. The underlying platform leverages big data generated by field deployed sensors and device to develop and advance analytics engine. “The solution is all about designing IoT use cases for various industries in the Indian market. Unlimit Insights based use cases provides device registration, IoT rules, advanced analytics, visualisation, reports and cognitive capabilities,” mentions Hase.
Unlimit has partnered with established IoT stakeholders such as BSNL, Cisco Jasper, Software AG Cumulocity IoT, and IBM Watson IoT to provide dedicated IoT solutions in the field of automotive, industry 4.0, transport and logistics. “This will enable both Indian and multi-national organisations to excel their IoT business with an efficient go-to-market strategy and by scaling business processes with a high-service reliability at low ownership costs,” says Hase. He also mentions that on the enablement side, the company has built sector specific solutions such as Usage Based Insurance for the automotive and financial services, Unlimit Solar and Unlimit Smart Manufacturing for the industry 4.0, and Unlimit TrackLite and Unlimit Sense for the transportation and logistics.
Future plans
Speaking about the future plans in terms of channel marketing strategy, Hase remarks, “We are convinced that the current IoT scenario presents the largest opportunity for the channel. Many of the services will be high-margin and will require a specialised skill set. The permutations and combinations of industry, geography, customer size and line of business will almost eliminate the commoditization that has taken over the mainstream VAR business.”
The company is looking for the channel partners with an ability to understand this intersection of micro-markets. They will be uniquely positioned to work on these opportunities on a national scale and perhaps globally. “Our partner choice will not be too small for an established vendor to take notice or get distracted, but large enough in revenue and profit to drive entirely new businesses,” he states.
Going forward, the company will further deepen its platform capabilities by offering Unlimit Consult, Unlimit Secure, and Unlimit Data. The focus verticals will be expanded as per the market requirement.
