Verizon Announces IoT Strategy, Partner Opportunity

**Editor’s Note: Get Channel Partners Editor-in-Chief Lorna Garey’s take on Verizon’s new IoT initiative here.**

Verizon Communications is doubling down on the Internet of Things (IoT) with a new global strategy to accelerate market adoption with help from its more than 1,000 channel partners.

With revenue from its IoT and telematics offerings totaling $495 million year-to-date, Verizon says it already is generating one of the largest amounts of revenue from the IoT of any company in the United States.

“In order to tackle the complexity of the IoT ecosystem, no one can go at this alone,” Marie McGehee, a Verizon spokeswoman, told Channel Partners. “We believe that creating opportunities and solving big problems in agriculture, manufacturing and the sharing economy requires ongoing collaboration.”

The new plan includes launching ThingSpace, a new IoT platform allowing developers to create applications, customers to manage devices, partners to market their services and Verizon to launch integrated vertical offerings in an open environment.

Also, Verizon is creating a new dedicated network core and new connectivity options for the next-generation of IoT use cases; commercializing its big-data analytics engine for IoT deployments; and introducing three new end-to-end smart-cities services: Intelligent Video, Intelligent Lighting and Intelligent Traffic Management.

“Continued innovation in smart cities, connected cars and wearables demonstrates that IoT is the future for how we will live and work,” said Mike Lanman, Verizon’s senior vice president of enterprise products. “Despite the exciting potential, 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.”

ThingSpace allows users to manage their IoT environments and related data, end-to-end, from device to network to application. Developers can also build IoT offerings using Verizon’s capabilities and resources. Verizon will roll out hundreds more APIs on the platform throughout 2016.

“Under ThingSpace, developers will have access to an expanded set of APIs that they did not have before,” McGehee said. “We’ll also give developers a sandbox to create and test solutions. Once the developer’s solution is available, ultimately they will have the opportunity to market their solutions through the Verizon Partner Program. Also developers can manage their solution on the ThingSpace platform.”

Regarding widespread IoT deployment, Verizon has created a core IoT network within its LTE architecture optimized for Cat1 devices. It also has worked with partners to embed LTE chipsets in a wide range of connected machines to automate the provisioning process and make it faster to deploy IoT devices on its wide-area network.

“There are a wide range of opportunities for partners which include leveraging Verizon’s infrastructure such as network, cloud security to embedding their solutions into Verizon solutions as a white-label offer,” McGehee said.

Last week, Verizon reported new revenue streams from IoT totaled about $175 million in third-quarter 2015.