As the IoT industry prepares for the rollout of GSMA SGP.32, interoperability is becoming a key success factor for scalable, secure, and future-proof eSIM deployments. We spoke with Christine Caviglioli, VP Automotive and Mobility Services at Thales, about the opportunities and challenges of the new standard, the importance of interoperability across the IoT ecosystem, and how the strategic cooperation between Thales and COMPRION helps accelerate adoption. Below is a transcript of the interview.
How will SGP.32 shape the future of IoT eSIMs?
SGP.32 is really the next major evolution of IoT eSIM technology. It brings a more flexible, more scalable architecture –one that's built for large-scale IoT deployments – and it simplifies how we remotely provision and manage connected devices throughout their lifecycle.
But with that evolution, interoperability becomes more important than ever. We need seamless interaction between eIMs, IPAs, eUICCs, operator profiles, and cloud platforms. That's what guarantees reliable, secure, and scalable deployments on a global scale.
In which industries do SGP.32 use cases occur most frequently, and why is interoperability especially important there?
Automotive is expected to be one of the leading adopters of SGP.32, and that makes sense, because the industry already pioneered large-scale SGP.02 eSIM deployments for connected vehicles worldwide.
Now, migrating to SGP.32 in automotive involves several things: TCU software updates, integrating new platforms like eIM, interoperability testing with multiple MNOs across different regions, and migrating existing SGP.02 or SGP.22 profiles over to SGP.32.
Interoperability is especially critical here because connected vehicles operate globally. They need to maintain reliable connectivity over very long product lifecycles – sometimes ten years or more. And automotive has specific requirements too: emergency call handling, network fallback, seamless operator switching. All of that has to work.
Beyond automotive, SGP.32 is also highly relevant in industrial IoT, smart metering and utilities, logistics and asset tracking, and healthcare and smart infrastructure. Across all of these sectors, interoperability is fundamental- it's what ensures scalable, reliable, and secure deployments across multiple vendors, operators, and regions.
What interoperability challenges do companies face regarding SGP.32?
SGP.32 was designed to simplify IoT connectivity, but it also introduces new interoperability challenges – mainly because the ecosystem now has more roles and more interfaces.
What companies are facing today includes multiple eIM providers with different levels of standards compliance, inconsistent IPA implementations, and validation challenges between eIM, IPA, eUICC, and operator infrastructures. Add to that compatibility testing across different vendors and MNOs, and increasingly complex global onboarding and certification processes.
For automotive OEMs specifically, a lack of interoperability can mean more hardware and software SKUs, longer onboarding cycles, higher testing and validation costs, increased operational complexity, risk of vendor lock-in, and fragmented connectivity behavior across vehicle platforms.
For Mobile Network Operators, SGP.32 actually creates a major opportunity, it allows them to leverage their existing consumer eSIM infrastructure to support connected vehicles and IoT devices. But that opportunity depends on true interoperability between operator profiles and the SGP.32-enabled eUICCs that OEMs are deploying
How does the cooperation between Thales and COMPRION help mitigate these challenges?
The strategic partnership between Thales and COMPRION provides a dedicated end-to-end interoperability and validation environment – one that's fully based on the GSMA SGP.32 specification.
What we've done is combine COMPRION's testing infrastructure- their eIM, SM-DP+, IPAd reference implementations, eUICC Profile Manager, and COMPRION Network Bridge – with Thales' GSMA-compliant industrial and automotive-grade MultiSIM IoT eUICC and IPAe implementation.
Both companies have already validated the interoperability of their products against each other. We've tested standardized SGP.32 commands and functionalities under realistic operational conditions.
So what this gives the market is a proven test environment. Companies developing their own SGP.32 ecosystem can use it to validate interoperability, simplify integration and testing, and accelerate deployment readiness – whether that's for global IoT or automotive environments
What were the reasons to enter into this cooperation?
Both companies recognized that interoperability is becoming one of the most critical success factors for large-scale SGP.32 adoption.
As the ecosystem becomes more open and more distributed, seamless interaction between all the components – eIMs, IPAs, eUICCs, profiles, operator infrastructures – is essential. Without it, you get fragmentation and deployment complexity.
By combining COMPRION's expertise in testing and validation with Thales' leadership in eSIM, automotive connectivity, and secure IoT solutions, we're able to provide the market with a structured, standards-based interoperability environment.
The objective is to help ecosystem participants validate their implementations earlier, reduce technical complexity, accelerate integration cycles, and ultimately support secure, scalable, and globally interoperable SGP.32 deployments
