After more than a week of relative silence, Ingenu officially announced that it is looking for a new CEO and is embarking on a new strategic direction that will include “increased emphasis on ecosystem development to bring simple, turnkey solutions to the Internet of Things market. This will include enhancement of the RPMA (Random Phase Multiple Access) brand and focus on enabling and leveraging partners for success. This is essential as RPMA scales to many billions of connected devices.”
In a release announcing the news, the company added that it will also work to hire new management focusing on “wireless technology veterans that possess the industry experience to position RPMA as the worldwide de facto standard for IoT connectivity,” and that it will also leverage “operator partnerships to deliver RPMA network connectivity across the globe.”
Ingenu said the chairman of its board, Babak Razi, will serve as the company’s interim CEO while the company looks for a replacement for its previous CEO, John Horn.
“Ingenu’s RPMA has been established as the industry’s disruptive connectivity solution, serving the massive IoT market opportunity,” Razi said in the release. “With renewed emphasis on its technology, the company and its RPMA ecosystem are well positioned to benefit from this growth.”
FierceWireless reported earlier this month that Horn was no longer CEO of Ingenu.
In an interview with FierceWireless following the company’s announcement, Ingenu’s Chief Network Officer Rob Boesel said that “we want to accelerate the growth of the RPMA ecosystem,” which he explained “requires a slightly different focus and slightly different skill set.”
He said that Ingenu has been licensing its RPMA technology internationally and will work to expand the licensing of its technology in the United States and globally. He said the company will continue to support its existing network footprint and network operations, and that he expects the changes to the company’s focus will result in an acceleration of the expansion of RPMA networks nationwide and globally.
When asked about possible layoffs at Ingenu, Boesel said there was “no determination of anything like that” but added that there might be some “adjustments” in the company’s workforce to align with its direction.
Interestingly, former top executives from Qualcomm and Verizon appeared to have left Ingenu’s board, but the company said that former Qualcomm executive Andrew Viterbi and former Verizon executives Ivan Seidenberg and Richard Lynch would continue to work with Ingenu as “board advisors.”
San Diego, California-based Ingenu launched in more than 30 metro areas in 2016, including Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Diego. Earlier this year the company said that its goal in 2017 was to grow its RPMA markets to around 100. However, Boesel declined to confirm whether the company would hit that number, noting that Ingenu’s buildout targets “are going to be reevaluated.”
Boesel added that Ingenu’s business model “has not fundamentally changed” and that the company will work with licensees to build out RPMA networks for the IoT, and that going forward the company would work to increase support for the RPMA ecosystem.
In working to create an RPMA ecosystem, Ingenu will be going up against LoRa network technology, which also works in unlicensed spectrum to support IoT applications.
“We consider LoRa playing in the same space, but in a different way,” Boesel said. “The RPMA solution, end to end, is designed and implemented solely by Ingenu, so you have a guarantee of end to end functionality and performance metrics being met. LoRa to us is more fractured, with independent companies delivering different pieces of the solution, which, from a philosophical sort of concept, leads to interoperability and functional performance problems.”
Concluded Boesel of Ingenu: “There will be a lot more news coming out in the coming weeks, around a number of exciting pilots and the like. The changes were really spurred on by some really fantastic traction we’ve been getting in the ecosystem space and the success that those opportunities and project executions have brought to the company. We decided that that’s something we want a lot more of, and we should be seeing some more press about that in the coming weeks and months.”