EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Mark Bartolomeo, Verizon’s VP of IoT solutions, said the ecosystem necessary to support mass deployments is “coming together”, but acknowledged progress is slow.

According to Bartolomeo, businesses are now having an easier time finding suitable IoT use cases. He also said the advent of low power IoT technologies is helping improve the economics around devices and connectivity, which enables more businesses to adopt solutions. However, building the ecosystem necessary to enable scaling from 30 million devices to a forecast figure of 20 billion is taking a bit more time.

“It’s coming together, albeit slowly,” Bartolomeo told Mobile World Live, adding: “I believe that the carriers have a responsibility to use their scale and to use their infrastructure to attract service providers and to help build and deliver seamless solutions. We’re doing that really in two ways. We’re creating the right types of partnerships, where we believe together we can create value, and then we’ve also done many acquisitions in the area of telematics and fleet management, where we believe it’s important for us to own the IP.”

More comments from Bartolomeo about Verizon’s State of the IoT report and the operator’s plans for LTE-M and NB-IoT can be found below:

Interview: Verizon IoT