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How much does HPE's credible IoT bundle cost? Anyone? Hello?

Answers on a post card to El Reg please

Hewlett Packard Enterprise made a nice claim today: it can cut the time to lob operational tech (IoT devices) on to a network and the cost of doing so – the blockers, it said, to wider enterprise and industrial adoption.

The big questions the company didn't answer in a particularly convincing way were how much the new bundle of hardware and software will cost or indeed the return on investment timescales for customers.

Keerti Melkote, senior veep and GM at HPE, said WANs were designed to provision mobile phones, and it would invariably take telcos between 30 minutes to an hour to get a customer up and running.

"This is a fairly lengthy process to provision and costs a lot to do," he told a pack of journos at the Discover event in London.

This model worked for telcos selling mobile phone tariffs but provisioning an IoT device cost around $16 and could be cut to $1 for any telco that buys its Mobile Virtual Network Enabler (MVNE), he said.

MVNE is built to streamline the provisioning, configuration, administration and billing processes for devices that are wirelessly connected to the web. It may smooth the way for telcos to go hard on IoT-as-a-service.

HPE's Universal IoT Platform is supposed to manage interoperability of a complex set of devices, supporting oneM2M, an architecture and standards for machine-to-machine comms in different industries.

This means multiple MVNE devices using cellular, radio, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and lower-power SIGFOX or LoRa connectivity deployments can be managed and monitored, with reporting and analytics provided.

The Aruba 2540 is the switch of choice for the bundle, which includes the new ClearPass Universal Profiler that lists the IoT devices on the network and sets policies for each.

"This limits the attack surface and reduces the threats that devices pose to the network," said Melkote.

He claimed the cost and latency issues of sending IoT data to the data centre was prohibitive. With this in mind, HPE launched two Edgeline Converged Systems in June. The Vertica Analytics Platform runs on the higher-end 4000 version, offering historical and predictive insights.

So far so good? We agreed. But how much does all this stuff cost? Melkote said the Profiler started at $5,000 and, depending on the number of devices on the network, went up to $50,000. Neither he nor multiple marketing people were able to get us the total costs of the system or give a ROI period.

We'll update the article when someone in the know gets back to us. ®

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