Verizon Announces Vision for IoT Future

Yet another communications company has made it clear that the future is the IoT. In a livestreamed announcement on Wednesday, October 28, Verizon, (News - Alert) from its San Francisco Innovation Center, unveiled its vision the IoT. And it is called ThingSpace.

ThingSpace, the company said, is designed to take IoT solutions development and make it easy, quick and cost effective. It’s been in development for two years and is basically a web-based development platform, loaded with a set of APIs and a management tool for data and device activity analytics, all with the goal of bringing development costs down.

“We’re taking the scale of Verizon and bringing it to market for IoT developers to use,” said Mike Lanman, SVP, Enterprise Products, Verizon. “Verizon has been a partner-friendly company since we got into the IoT space.”

And the partnerships are the real power behind ThingSpace, according to the company. By making strategic partnerships to deploy the solution everywhere it can, Verizon hopes to tackle big challenges in agriculture, healthcare, the consumer electronics evolution and the sharing economy, according to the announcement. Among its early customer/partners are Intel and Renaissance, an automotive technology company.

In fact, the company claims an ecosystem of more than 1,000 channel partners and revenue from its IoT and telematics solutions adding up to about $495 million so far this year, meaning that Verizon is saying it already has generated one of the largest amounts of revenue from the IoT of any company in the U.S.

“Continued innovation in smart cities, connected cars and wearables demonstrates that IoT is the future for how we will live and work,” said Lanman. “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. That’s where Verizon comes in. With our experience in networks, devices, platforms and applications, we are taking a holistic approach to simplifying adoption to expand the IoT market from millions to billions of connections.”

For developers looking to deploy new IoT solutions, Verizon says ThingSpace is here to help. New IoT solutions have to go through multiple channels and cumbersome processes to access the tools they need to create and launch applications, the company said. Instead, ThingSpace helps users manage IoT environments and data, from edge device to network to applications. And it’s pretty confident that the formula works, since it’s live and ready for all developers to code and test, even if they are not a Verizon customer.

Looks like there’s a red streak zooming through the IoT and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.