Verizon is on a roll…

Verizon is getting aggressive in growing its IoT business. Verizon’s first foray in IoT was in Smart Home when they launched a service around the solution from 4Home (acquired by Motorola, my guess is that the acquisition was influenced by Verizon?). It was a DIY service unlike its peers who had launched managed services (Comcast, AT&T, Cox, ADT), and IMO it was dead on arrival. It limped along for 4 years and finally shut down.

Verizon’s strategy also seemed uncertain when they acquired Hughes Telematics back in June of 2012. Hughes Telematics is based in Atlanta – and I have only heard of anecdotes and rumors of that division constantly losing people or being laid off since 2012. It felt that their Connected Car strategy was falling apart.

However recent events point to a different story – they are getting serious about this space. They have announced two back to back acquisitions. First with Telogis in June of this year and it was followed by Fleetmatics in August. Verizon certainly has heft between the three acquisitions in the Connected Car & Telematics space.

And to keep the momentum rolling – Verizon announced that it is acquiring Sensity Systems, a Smart City startup last week.

The question though is does it have the internal organizational strength and discipline to make the most of all of these acquisitions. Remember that they have also announced that they are acquiring Yahoo!

List of all the VZ Acquisitions as compiled by Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/verizon/acquisitions

 

Here is list of analysis on the acquisitions worth reading:

CRN on the the reaction of VZ Partners

CRN on the Sensity acquisition

TechRepublic on the Sensity acquisition

 

 

 

Advertisement

Internet of Things: IP or Not

Rethinking the Internet of Things: A Scalable Approach to Connecting Everything (which BTW is free for the Kindle Edition) makes the case for a Non-IP (non Internet Protocol) stack approach for “things” to be connected. While I am in agreement in the author, the approach seems to be all or nothing – which is not true either. I feel that for constrained devices, that emit limited data and require low bandwidth – a non-IP approach makes sense. I am not entirely clear on how many of those billions of connected devices are really simple/constrained devices.

There would be three categories of “things” based on how they connect to the Internet:

1. Devices/Things that have the resources (CPU/Memory/Connectivity) to support and run the TCP/IP stack similar or identical to ones found in PCs/Macs/Tablets/Smartphones.

2. Simple, Standalone Devices or Things: More like sensors that have limited resources making it unsuitable even for running the constrained version of IP stack – 6LoWPAN and its variants – will need to support a connectivity protocol/stack that is ideal for the low bandwidth, long battery life requirements.

BTW these type of devices/things have been around for decades now – however getting them connected to the “Internet” allows making their data available, and hence unlocking the value.

3. Complex Devices/Things – These are hybrid of 1 and 2 that is they have their own “network” not based on IP – and may leverage connectivity/protocol specific to its industry or use case. And it has a integrated gateway or bridge that takes relevant data back and forth between IP and its internal Non-IP network. A great example of this is an Automobile (now popularly in the IoT vernacular being called “Connected Car”) – the automobile makes use of CAN Bus (since the 1980s). Autos are now connecting up to the Internet using Wi-Fi or 3G/LTE (or both), and they are building in functionality to go back and forth over an IP connection to the CAN Bus as well.