MWC 2019 IoT Blog, Monday 25th February 2019: Streetlight infrastructure; Telstra and Ericsson IoT Accelerator; 5G acceleration set to drive strong connection growth; SAP makes IoT strides; AT&T and Vodafone Business Team Up to Drive IoT Connectivity; Vodafone and Arm partner to eliminate the need for traditional SIM cards.
Strategy Analytics has a large team of analysts across IoT, Smartphones, Drones, Robots, Tablets, Wearables, Components, Smart home and connected cars in attendance. Too meet or follow-up with our IoT analysts, please get in touch here
Mobile World Congress (MWC 2019) - From Monday 25th to Thursday 28th February, over 2,400 leading companies and 107,000 attendees will come together at Fira Gran Via and Fira Montjuic to discuss the latest innovations and explore the hottest topics influencing the industry.
MWC Barcelona offers an array of dazzling speakers representing organisations from across the broad mobile ecosystem. The theme of this year’s event is ‘Intelligent Connectivity’ – the term we use to describe the powerful combination of flexible, high-speed 5G networks, the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. Intelligent connectivity marks the beginning of a new era defined by highly contextualised and personalised experiences, delivered when and where you want them. This is the future of our industry and our world.
Within Intelligent Connectivity, there are 8 core themes: Connectivity focuses on the business and cultural challenges brought forth by 5G; AI explores the profound impact of this new technology; Industry 4.0 looks at the internet of things and Immersive Content focuses on the expectations of AR and VR. Meanwhile, Disruptive Innovation identifies the big changes of our future; Digital Wellness discusses mental health and smartphones, Digital Trust focuses on the ethics and regulations of data and ‘The Future’ envisions what the world will look like in 2028.
Monday highlighted some of the key IoT themes, such as, connectivity, artificial intelligence & machine learning and smart cities.
One of the biggest enterprise trends for 2019 is 5G. Mobility leaders across all sectors were talking about the implications of 5G in the workplace.
Streetlight infrastructure is proving to be an avenue for new smart city technologies such as urban data AI and small cells for LTE and 5G. All require on-device computing that combines robust performance with low running costs. Telensa, a vendor in smart street lighting and smart city applications, today announced they will support heterogeneous computing and on-device intelligence powered by the Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine, designed to allow the sensors to extract detailed real-time insights from the raw data and eliminate much of the cost of moving data to the cloud.
Australian service provider Telstra and Ericsson have announced their partnership to deliver Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity to global enterprises by integrating Ericsson’s Connectivity Management services from Ericsson’s IoT Accelerator solution into Telstra’s IoT solution and mobile network. The partnership will bring together Telstra’s cellular IoT capabilities and Ericsson’s connectivity services to enable OEMs and enterprises to deploy, manage and scale IoT connected devices and applications globally.
As IoT matures, companies introducing mobile IoT services are entering the market at an ideal time, as network rollouts have reached critical mass and the ecosystem is more pragmatic. These were the key messages expressed during a panel discussion at the GSMA’s Mobile IoT Summit. Ankur Bhan, global head of Nokia’s Worldwide IoT Network Grid, noted the sector has scaled back some of its ambitious initial projections and is more realistic about the uptake of IoT services. He added there is lot of fragmentation, with many markets like China and US quite advanced, whereas others are just getting started.
To drive growth, it’s important to stay focused on global specifications and standards which will improve the economies of scale, with global traction expanding rapidly, and push down chipset prices. With 5G networks on the way, the industry needs to make sure use cases are able to co-exist using 5G spectrum to make them future-proof.
SAP made several IoT announcements. Firstly it launched Leonardo IoT, a new platform that aims to help enterprises grow revenue, increase productivity and improve customer experience by bringing physical data into the fold. Leonardo IoT will help combine IoT data with business process data from SAP applications, such as SuccessFactors and Hana,, it will help to improve existing practices as well as extending the capabilities of existing SAP IoT applications; and creating new intelligent IoT applications.
SAP also announced they are partnering with Microsoft to let Leonardo IoT customers use Azure IoT Hub for connectivity and device management, two features that Leonardo IoT supports. SAP is also releasing a version of Leonardo IoT for edge devices that runs on Microsoft's Azure IoT Edge runtime. Strategy Analytics highlighted SAP's strength in the German IoT market here and thinks this will continue to help the company drive growth from IoT.
Automotive companies face many challenges when deploying connected car solutions across countries. Each market has unique requirements and regulations, and it can be complicated for automakers to work across multiple network operators and vendors. AT&T and Vodafone Business are working together to accelerate IoT connectivity and innovation in the automotive industry. The companies will bring together their industry-leading expertise to develop superior and consistent connected car solutions and experiences for customers across their combined footprints in North America, Europe and Africa.
Furthermore, Vodafone also announced a strategic agreement with Arm that will significantly reduce complexity and costs faced by organisations when implementing IoT solutions. This partnership brings together Vodafone IoT global platform and connectivity, and Arm’s IoT software and services to provide enterprises with programmable, connected system on chip designs that eliminate the need for traditional SIM cards. This allows customers to securely deploy, remotely provision and manage massive numbers of IoT devices across global markets at a significantly lower cost and complexity as Fragmentation, security and cost are three limiting factors in IoT.
Be sure to check back here tomorrow for more highlights from the Strategy Analytics IoT Team at MWC 2019.