Geoverse Takes Private Cellular to the Market

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 Geoverse is in a new stage of its go-to-market effort, developing a partner ecosystem to extend its reach into the enterprise space. Bob Gault, who joined Geoverse six months ago as Chief Commercial Officer, is heading up that effort.

“A variety of industry partners can benefit from our Network as a Service (NaaS) solution approach and the underlying ecosystem partner program: technology vendors, system integrators, VARs, consultants, and more,” Gault said. “NaaS can then be more easily tailored for specific customer types or market segments served by these partners who know them best.”

Geoverse is a national provider and operator of managed private Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS/LTE) solutions for the enterprise, which provides connectivity solutions, combining purpose-built private networks, edge computing and global roaming relationships.

“The differentiator for Geoverse is that we can provide a customer with cellular service for occupants and visitors and couple it with connectivity for IoT and enterprise applications, all on the same platform,” Gault said. “We offer the enterprise customer an option of being able to tap into CBRS, whether it’s generally available spectrum or licensed spectrum or both,” Gault said.

Geoverse is a subsidiary of ATN International, which owns U.S. regional and international wireless providers, among other investments.

“We have a cellular heritage, which is pretty compelling in this marketplace,” Gault said. “If our customers choose, we can provide insourced, not outsourced, level one through level three support to our end user customers. We can offer up ATN’s services and software solutions and a CapEx and OpEx model.”

The real crown jewel in Geoverse’s offering, according to Gault, is the cellular service staple – the ability to roam from the private cellular network onto a public cellular system.

“That roaming solution provides our customers with the opportunity to extend their coverage and capacity into the tier one service providers,” Gault said. “We call them borderless networks, which allow users to take the private cellular experience and extend it beyond the private cellular coverage area.”

Vertical Market Focus

Because the enterprise market is so big, Gault said the key approaching it is to focus on a few verticals. Geoverse is focusing on intermodal, which is ports and airports, logistics, state and local education, municipalities, mining, healthcare, and hospitality and gaming.

“We are focusing on ports, for example, because they’re in remote parts of the country where the tier ones have a difficult time playing in a cost-effective way,” he said. “We happen to be a great alternative for customers in those specific verticals, and so the next step is deciding how we approach it.”

Geoverse is entering its second year as the managed service partner for the City of Tucson’s CBRS network being rolled out across the city. The municipal network, which is one of the largest municipal cellular networks, enables remote learning and multiple smart city applications.

The city has deployed the Geoverse GeoCore Evolved Packet Core (EPC) to manage the CBRS radio network infrastructure from JMA Wireless, the Spectrum Access Service from Google, and user devices. Mobile devices and end points use the Geoverse SIM card, enabling them to securely connect to the private network and use capabilities such as roaming if they travel off the network.

National Partner Program

Because enterprises cannot be cost-effectively approached one by one in a direct model, according to Gault, Geoverse opted for a channel lead model, for which it is currently recruiting and onboarding partners that can help it with capacity, competency, and capabilities and with scale across the enterprise.

As a result, Geoverse can provide a complete turnkey solution, where it does the deployment and provides everything from the radio and the sim cards to the EPC, or it can work with the partner community.

Late in 2020, Geoverse began a national partner program, and it started recruiting ecosystem partners, service providers, networking partners, cellular resellers and agents.

“We’re a managed turnkey solution but we’re also very channel friendly,” Gault said. “We believe there’s enough opportunity across the ecosystem for our partners’ value proposition to play a role, across that supply chain or across that solution for the enterprise customer.”

Geoverse has just launched an online partner portal to enable and equip the partner community with the information and tools required to successfully identify, engage and close new opportunities. The dedicated online portal will serve these organizations by offering a host of product and technical information, partner specific materials, training videos, real world use case examples, commercial case studies, pricing and configuration tools, deal registration and the opportunity to connect with other partners.

“We’ve done a really nice job of identifying partners that play different roles across the enterprise space,” Gault said. “We have recruited and onboarded a number them since the beginning of the fiscal year. It’s in the early stages but it’s accelerating quickly. We’ve already begun to train with them.”

In the middle of May, Geoverse joined Zebra Technologies’ PartnerConnect program, which gives it access to Zebra’s CBRS and licensed LTE user devices, such as the Zebra L10 rugged tablet device portfolio, along with comprehensive training, extensive marketing, sales, and technical benefits. Additionally, Zebra is involved in the transportation, logistics and manufacturing markets.

“Being a PartnerConnect member will allow us to collaborate with Zebra’s global partner network and better meet the needs of our customers,” said Gault. “The PartnerConnect program makes it easier for us to differentiate ourselves while working together with Zebra to give a performance edge to the front line of business.”

Gault said his goals for 2021 include raising the awareness and understanding of private cellular in the marketplace, as well as increasing the profile of Geoverse as a provider of private cellular.

“We will be increasing the pipeline, because that generally translates into wins, and growing our customer base,” he said. “At the end of the day, we will be creating the infrastructure, the tools, the processes, and the systems, as well as recruiting the people that will help us grow, for when this marketplace becomes mainstream, which is not that far away.”

For more information, visit https://www.geoverse.io/.

 

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