Sercomm uses AWS IoT Core to Reduce Time-to-Market for Smart Solutions

By launching its S1 Cloud platform development kit on AWS, Sercomm is helping global customers reduce their time-to-market for smart solutions to 6 months from 18 months. Sercomm is a technology solutions provider with a renewed focus on IoT. Its S1 Cloud solution uses AWS IoT Core to securely connect devices to the cloud and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams to capture, process, and store media streams.

Smart technology, which relies on the Internet of Things (IoT) to connect lighting, cameras, and even doorbells in homes and businesses, is a rapidly growing industry. By 2025, the smart home market is expected to be worth $144 billion globally. Telecommunications providers (telcos) and security corporations are just some of the businesses looking to develop smart solutions for their customers. 

Founded in 1992, Sercomm provides private-label mobility, broadband access, and IoT solutions—including hardware such as IP surveillance cameras and backend software—for major telcos and systems integrators. In speaking to its customers, Sercomm learned that the development time for launching new smart home and business monitoring solutions was 12–18 months at best. 

With decades of experience serving tier-one global customers and a desire to evolve its business into a service-oriented model, Sercomm felt it could help its customers reduce their time to market. As Andy Lin, director of platform partnerships at Sercomm, says, “We had built up more than 20 years of expertise in the field of IoT and network design infrastructure and wanted to expand our hardware-centric offering. Our goal was to combine and streamline all our IoT solutions into a conveniently bundled package.”

For a period of nearly six years, Sercomm tried to design its own first-generation IoT platform as a service (PaaS), spending a majority of its time on recruiting and training developers. However, with the relentless advancement of technology, there was a need to constantly retrain, retool, and recruit for new skills. 

Over time, Sercomm came to understand that the monolithic architecture of its PaaS was not agile enough to meet rapidly changing technology models or the customization requirements demanded by its customers. This triggered a shift in thinking. “We realized that trying to become a PaaS company would be challenging. We are now offering a platform development kit for our customers that empowers them to build their own proprietary platform catering to business needs,” Lin explains. 

Sercomm recognized that cloud service providers were increasingly offering infrastructure that would enable the company to deliver a modular solution from which its customers could pick and choose the offerings that best fit their needs. Sercomm ran proof of concepts of leading cloud service providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). Lin says, “AWS provided the most complete solution for us to build an efficient, cost-effective platform development kit in the shortest amount of time.” Sercomm completely revamped its entire IoT platform, which included training engineers on the AWS Cloud, in just 18 months.

Sercomm worked closely with AWS Solutions Architects as the platform took shape to ensure well-architected environments that were cost effective for its customers. The new offering, deemed Sercomm S1 Cloud, comprises six microservices in a serverless environment based on AWS Lambda and AWS IoT Core. With the pay-as-you-go computing model on AWS and automated code execution on AWS Lambda, customers are only charged for resources used. AWS Solutions Architects also helped Sercomm fine-tune the database interfaces used for storage, primarily Amazon Aurora and Amazon DynamoDB. 

S1 Cloud uses Amazon Kinesis Video Streams to capture, compress, and encode video streams from Sercomm security cameras using a simple web address. “The completeness of AWS services such as Amazon Kinesis Video Streams was beyond that of the competition,” Lin says. He estimates that by using S1 Cloud instead of building their own IoT solutions, Sercomm customers can save 50 percent on operational costs for video streaming and video-clip storage.

By building its solution on the AWS Cloud, Sercomm is able to accelerate the time-to-market for its customers to develop smart solutions for homes and businesses. S1 Cloud’s value proposition is to reduce development time from 18 months to 6 months using its platform development kit in conjunction with a Sercomm hardware product. With AWS IoT Core, API integration is simplified so that Sercomm customers have the flexibility to run S1 Cloud in their choice of cloud or on-premises environments. This saves time that would have otherwise been spent resolving backend integration concerns and broadens market appeal for the service. 

Furthermore, the ability to offer a secure IoT solution that can scale across borders has been a key benefit in attracting customers. “We hit a hiccup in terms of scaling our former proprietary platform, but on AWS, our security and scalability concerns have been resolved. Since all our customers are global businesses, compliance with overseas technology protocols is key, as is latency,” Lin says. Latency between IoT devices and servers in separate global regions has gone down by 75 percent on AWS.

Scalability is also enhanced with a serverless design. “The AWS platform fit our business needs because it can be designed in a completely serverless architecture so our customers can easily add their own components without needing to unwind all the underlying cloud components,” Lin says. The modularity Sercomm can offer its customers with the new solution enables customers to use only the services they need among the six offered microservices. Now Sercomm customers have the flexibility to pay with a monthly subscription or a one-time purchase according to their preferences. “Using AWS, we can sell our products in a way that’s consistent with our software offering,” Lin adds.

Almost 12 months since its launch, S1 Cloud is attracting attention from around the world. While sales conversations are still ongoing, Lin and his colleagues are busy developing AI software for Sercomm’s IP camera, among other projects. Previously, half of Sercomm’s time would be focused on infrastructure management and load balancing. Now, the company can focus almost all of its resources on development. “With AWS, all our engineering resources are now devoted to developing core components that are helping us differentiate and powering the transition to a service-oriented business,” Lin concludes.