If your world is SaaS, RST, JSON, MQTT and serverless, you'll want a connectivity provider that speaks the same language.

Once you've decided you need cellular connectivity for your connected service, you now have the choice of which provider to choose. Obviously, price, coverage, and global scope will be important factors, but there's another that might not be as obvious: technology stack. 

M2M providers have been around for many years, both directly from the mobile operators, and from independent "MVNOs". Of course, as the IoT market emerged, all these existing players got in on the action. At the same time, a new generation of connectivity providers emerged, who were cloud- and IoT-native.

M2M vs IoT

These are just the same thing, aren't they? Well, they both use cellular networks to transmit data from devices, but it's what happens after that that differentiates then. M2M providers traditionally arranged to deliver the data to the customer's data via a VPN connection.

In IoT, the data will most commonly be delivered over the public internet to AWS, Azure, or Google.

Being cloud-native, the new IoT providers often have much more integrated connections to your cloud provider, in particular with regards to security. For instance:

• Eseye integrate directly into AWS IoT to completely automate the certificate exchange process securely via the mobile network 
• Twilio are previewing a service where they include certificates with their SIMs which can be used to connect to over TLS
• EMnify are hosted on AWS, and provide a live event feed to AWS services

In addition, all of these providers offer clean, simple, modern REST APIs to integrate with your stack. 

Choosing a provider that matches your technology stack will mean less integration hassle, and more time to build your proposition.