Verizon has a strong presence in the internet of things (IoT) space and its ThingSpace IoT platform is a key component of the telco’s IoT offering.
“ThingSpace is built on a simple, open development platform which enables the delivery of solutions over a single IoT portal,” Verizon’s ThingSpace product and platform manager Uzair Siddiqui, said during a presentation at the Enterprise IoT Summit, which took place in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.
Verizon launched its ThingSpace IoT platform in 2015, when the IoT was a new concept for many of Verizon’s customers and partners. The telco said that this IoT offering is a single platform for onboarding, device connectivity, device management, data management, analytics and applications environment.
Verizon’s ThingSpace IoT platform has three main components: ThingSpace Develop, ThingSpace Manage, and ThingSpace Market.
ThingSpace Develop is a place for developers to access Verizon’s application programming interfaces. “This place is where the developer community can comment and start creating IoT applications,” the executive said.
“We want to make it easy for the developers to use the IoT technology to turn their idea into a prototype,” said Siddiqui. He said Verizon’s goal with developers is to “make it easy for them to develop their solutions by making dashboards available for them to ingest sensor data and make sensor data actionable.”
ThingsSpace Manage is software that enables Verizon’s customers to manage their connected devices. Dashboards give users visibility into their assets on the Verizon network. “This is an area where if you have thousands or hundreds of thousands of devices that you have deployed on cellular connectivity, you can go there to manage those devices,” the executive said.
“Once you have deployed hundreds of thousands of devices, we can activate, deactivate, see how much data they are using, and then be able to do firmware patches and device management,” Siddiqui added. Customers can also set limits for data consumption with the ThingSpace Manage component, the executive said.
ThingSpace Market is a way for Verizon to help developers bring their solutions to potential customers. Although Verizon prefers to work with developers who are creating products for the Verizon network, Siddiqui said that the ThingSpace platform can analyze data from other connected devices as well.
