Capestone started twelve years ago as a spin-off from KPN. It is a specialized 4G/5G Wireless WAN & IoT distributor that supplies hardware, connectivity and services in the area of network monitoring to more than 700 resellers.
On the basis of two use cases Capestone highlights the strength of the company. As is often the case in projects of this kind, the name of the end customer cannot be mentioned, but an impression of the activities of this distributor is given. CEO Jos Ouwerkerk: “We developed a proposition for a large telecom provider which they resold to an end customer. The solution was built around the hardware of Cradlepoint, of which we are a distributor.” Specifically, it involved connecting about 12,000 printers worldwide to the Internet. “The desire was to monitor and manage the entire stack and network centrally.”
Capestone developed a proposition with 4G and 5G routers suitable for industrial IoT applications. “The different printers were located in 3,000 locations,” explains Vanessa Claessen Sales Director EMEA IoT at Capestone ,. By offering 4G routers in combination with an IoT SIM card and a central dashboard, it became possible to monitor and manage all the printers mobile and remotely. Claessen: “The end customer can log in remotely to the devices. There is no need for someone to walk by all the time to check whether the cartridges are still full. The quality of the network and the passing on of updates can also be taken care of remotely”. Capestone also offered a service proposition. The customer could conclude an SLA with Capestone that guaranteed uptime. “In case of problems, we can be reached day and night to solve the problems,” he says.
CEO Jos Ouwerkerk highlights another use case. “We received an order from a large supplier of airo’s. This involved a file of about 35,000 installed units, which you could call ‘dumb’ to the extent that an employee at a customer organization had to call if the air conditioning unit turned out not to be working. We made sure that, by using an IoT SIM card and an IoT router, these devices could be monitored remotely.” Incidentally, the air conditioners in question are located in both Europe and Africa.
Claessen explains that for both cases remote management of the routers and being able to guarantee a very secure mobile Internet connection is guaranteed by unique cloud-managed management and application platform: NetCloud offered by Cradlepoint. Integrating NetCloud with the routers creates the opportunity to improve productivity, increase reliability and reduce costs.
[This article was previously published in ChannelConnect 5 – 2021
