Ericsson is taking a stab at making 5G a reality by enabling large-scale adoption of massive IoT, launching the IoT Accelerator Marketplace to help address the need for collaboration for developers and service providers. The marketplace will be the subject of a demonstration at Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona next week.
Service providers will find a catalog to locate IoT apps from the global ecosystem to offer enterprise customers and shorter time to market to offer new solutions to enterprise customers.
For application developers, the marketplace will enable them to connect with service providers through a single platform rather than having to approach each of them individually.
“The launch of IoT Accelerator Marketplace will unlock the potential for different players in the value chain to deliver value,” said Jeff Travers, head of IoT at Ericsson, in a release. “It is another stepping stone to make 5G a reality by enabling massive adoption of massive IoT. This supports service providers as they seek to expose network connectivity IoT APIs and monetize these assets.”
As service providers are racing to scale and differentiate in the fast-moving IoT space, it’s necessary for them to have a robust developer ecosystem to help them compete, according to Carrie MacGillivray, group vice president of IoT & Mobility at IDC. For developers working across multiple service provider networks and platforms, the challenges of fragmentation are addressed by using APIs that apply globally and are consistent across all mobile networks.
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The vendor ramped up its pursuit of IoT last year through a new, dedicated organization. Ericsson told FierceWireless at the time that it was building up its IoT business with service providers, addressing industries based on use cases.
As one might expect, Ericsson’s IoT solution covers all the 3GPP standard technologies, including 2G, 3G, 4G, LTE-M, NB-IOT and emerging 5G, a representative confirmed.