Verizon Extends IoT Scope, Announces New Partnerships

PRESS RELEASE — BARCELONA, Spain, Feb. 23, 2016 — Today at Mobile World Congress, Verizon outlined how ThingSpace, its simple platform allowing small, medium and large businesses worldwide to build and consume applications enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), continues to make gains. With more than 4,000 developers using ThingSpace since its October launch, the company announced plans to open up the platform to third-party network and technology service providers. Verizon will also roll out a new set of tools designed to address security concerns industrywide. The moves demonstrate Verizon’s overarching strategy to reduce IoT complexity and market fragmentation to accelerate market adoption. Revenues from Verizon’s IoT and telematics businesses totaled $690 million as of year-end 2015.

Key milestones since launch

“By addressing key barriers at the network, platform and application levels, our mission is to make IoT more accessible to consumers and public sector organizations while allowing businesses, and developers of all sizes to compete in new markets globally,” said Mike Lanman, senior vice president of IoT and Enterprise Products at Verizon. “That’s why we’re so bullish on driving investments, innovations and partnerships on ThingSpace that make market adoption for IoT more pervasive.”{ad}

Commercializing ThingSpace for other network and technology service providers

To open up the Internet of Things to the broader ecosystem, Verizon is actively engaged in extending ThingSpace to other network and …

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… technology service providers, to provide their customers the ability to consume leading-edge IoT services designed by Verizon’s innovative product technology team – VZ Labs. The move is specifically targeted to companies who may not have the scale, technical requirements or capital budgets to build end-to-end IoT solutions on their own – but want to make IoT-enabled technologies available to their customers at scale.

Securing the Internet of Things

With security risk among the top concerns for IoT deployments, Verizon’s new IoT Security Credentialing (IoT SC) addresses the need for an added level of protection and safety. The new solution is specially designed to help prevent many of the security threats linked with some of today’s IoT deployments. This new offering adds an ‘over the top’ (OTT) layer of security to enable developers to better protect devices and applications regardless of service provider or type of transport deployed – e.g. cellular, Wi-Fi, wireline, etc. Additionally, IoT SC by Verizon is designed to secure sensitive data at the edge of the network. Availability on ThingSpace is spring 2016.

Today’s announcement follows initial results from Verizon’s 5G field trials in the U.S which the company made available yesterday. Last week, the company also introduced new enhancements for hum, its technology designed to make cars smarter, safer and more connected.

Also Tuesday, on the heels of Verizon’s global ThingSpace announcement, the company highlighted a series of new deployments and partnerships powered by the Internet of Things (IoT). Designed to tackle some of the biggest challenges in agriculture, healthcare, sustainability, public safety and urban development, ThingSpace, launched in October, is Verizon’s simple platform allowing businesses and developers of all sizes to build, manage and consume applications.

New projects underway include:

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“The key to shifting the Internet of Things from a fairly nascent space to broader market adoption is well-defined ROIs and business outcomes,” said Mark Bartolomeo vice president IoT Connected Solutions. “Through specific use cases deployed in collaboration with our customers and partners, we are seeing how seemingly disparate technologies when applied and integrated in a meaningful way can improve things like agriculture planning, urban development and public safety — paving the way for the next-generation of societal innovation in the digital economy.”

To learn more about how Verizon is helping its business customers transform their operations with new applications powered by the Internet of Things visit, here.

About Verizon
Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, NASDAQ: VZ) employs a diverse workforce of 177,700 and generated nearly $132 billion in 2015 revenues. Verizon operates America’s most reliable wireless network, with more than 112 million retail connections nationwide. Headquartered in New York, the company also provides communications and entertainment services over America’s most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers integrated business solutions to customers worldwide.

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