Vodafone, the UK-based telecommunications company, has now become the first global Internet of Things (IoT) mobile provider to have registered over 50 million connections. The company is currently witnessing a stellar growth of nearly 1 million connections every month.
The growth seems to be particularly high in the automotive, healthcare, and utility sectors. Vodafone’s IoT solutions intermingle its networks with the other partner networks to provide customers with simple, globally unified connectivity services all over the world.
IoT technologies have just started to go mainstream and are reaching critical mass in the enterprise level. Further, the technology has now become a core focus of research and development for a wide range of consumer technology companies.
Vodafone is offering a range of IoT solutions in India including Vodafone Location Tracker, Automotive Telematics, Remote Asset Management, Managed IoT Connectivity Platform, Wireless Payment Solutions, Security & Surveillance solutions, Smart Metering solutions and Special SIMS designed for operating in harsh conditions.
The telco is now labelled to be the market leader in mobile IoT worldwide, identified by Gartner as a ‘Leader’ in its Magic Quadrant for Managed M2M Services, Worldwide 2016, for the third consecutive year. It has also been recognised as ‘the consistent global leader’ in IoT services by Machina Research in its 2016 IoT Communications Service Provider Benchmarking report. This is the fifth consecutive year that Vodafone has been the leader in this report.
Nick Gliddon, Director, Vodafone Business Services, said, “Crossing the 50 million mark and being a global leader in IoT solutions is a testimony to Vodafone’s commitment and continued focus on innovation in the rapidly growing and dynamic IoT sector. We thank our customers for supporting us and helping us achieve this significant milestone.”
According to a report published by the company based on recent research, 24% of businesses’ IT budgets are being allocated to IoT. Also, 76% of companies say that IoT will be ‘critical’ for the future success of any organisation in their sector. Further, 48% of IoT adopters say they’re using IoT to support large-scale business transformation. 86% of businesses in the industrial sector — including companies in mining, construction, and waste management — say they have seen “significant” return from implementing IoT
