Verizon announced its global strategy to simplify the Internet of Things (IoT) and accelerate market adoption.

The company said that “with an ecosystem of more than 1,000 channel partners and revenue from its IoT and telematics solutions totalling $495 million year-to-date, it is generating one of the largest amounts of revenue from the IoT of any company in the US”.

The new strategy includes ThingSpace, a new IoT platform; creating a dedicated network core and connectivity options for the next-generation of IoT use cases; driving innovation to tackle challenges in areas like agriculture and healthcare; and commercialising its big data analytics engine for IoT deployments.

Verizon also wants to introduce three smart cities solutions: Intelligent Video, Intelligent Lighting and Intelligent Traffic Management.

These solutions will help municipalities monitor traffic and safety conditions in real-time and manage their systems in a dynamic way to improve efficiency and public safety, the company said.

Verizon is offering these solutions as-a-service so that municipal leaders can “start small and scale fast.”

Mike Lanman, senior VP, enterprise products, explained that there is need for a new strategy because “IoT is still too complex, too fragmented, too expensive to connect and too hard to scale. Success in that future relies on a leader that can cut through the complexity and change the IoT model.”

Verizon outlined its strategy at an event held at its San Francisco Innovation Center. The company also showcased how it’s putting its IoT capabilities to work for customers in the marketplace.

Projects underway include monitoring pharmaceutical products in the supply chain and helping colleges reduce their carbon footprint by up to 20 per cent by powering the Innova EV Car Share fleet of all-electric vehicles with an app called Verizon Share.

ThingSpace
Verizon believes one barrier to innovation is that developers of new IoT solutions have to go through cumbersome processes to access the tools they need.

Verizon wants to radically simplifying that process with ThingSpace, a self-service web interface, which allows users to manage their IoT environments and related data from device to network to application.

All developers can code and test on the ThingSpace platform.

In its Q3 results last week, Verizon said new revenue streams from IoT totalled approximately $175 million, and in August it launched Hum, a telematics service with “an addressable market of 150 million vehicles in the US”.