ThingSpace brings in thousands of developers across the globe in first four months

BARCELONA – 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

• Now hosting more than 4,000 developers on ThingSpace.
• A global IoT footprint with device connectivity in more than 120 countries across the globe today, growing to nearly 200 countries by year-end.
• Design and integration work with Nokia and Ericsson is now complete paving the way for the launch of Verizon’s new highly scalable IoT core network later this year. Verizon’s LTE core network architecture will be engineered to efficiently serve large deployments for new low power use cases.  
• A wide-selection of devices are now certified on its existing LTE architecture for IoT applications utilizing new low cost Category 1 chipsets /modules by Gemalto, Sequans and Telit.
• Accelerating development of Category M devices with Sequans for emerging ultra-low power and low cost use cases.
• Verizon’s Cloud APIs on ThingSpace will be available soon in beta to help developers improve consumer experiences for mobile apps primarily used to curate and retrieve photos, videos, music and other cloud-stored content. The Verizon Cloud APIs will help applications like [RealTimes by RealNetworks] and [Photobucket] offer added value to consumers.

“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.”

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 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.