Telefónica, chosen among the top 4 leaders in the IoT market according to Transforma Insights

Telefónica has been recognized among the Top 4 leaders in the recently released  report “Communications Service Providers IoT Peer Benchmarking 2020’ by research firm Transforma Insights. The report is based on analysis of the strategies of the leading ten global Communication Service Providers (CSP) across a diverse range of capabilities in IoT across three categories: technical, geographical and vertical.

The report singles out Telefónica “as having a strong position across each of the categories” and highlights the opportunities now that the IoT and Big Data capabilities have merged in the same business unit as part of Telefónica Tech.

“These are changing times for Telefónica. Its newly announced structure presents a lot of opportunities for the IoT business. The new management team could trigger some interesting new investments and the new organization has a number of good differentiators. Most prominent amongst these is a strong data analytics and visualization capabilities courtesy of the integration of LUCA (its Big Data and AI division) with the IoT offering. It also has strong offerings in retail and cybersecurity.”

“Transforma Insights also likes the interesting approaches to connectors stitching together the elements of the IoT proposition, including pre-integration with IoT public clouds”, states the report adding that ” the integration of the  IoT and Big Data business creates more freedom, particularly to look for inorganic opportunities of growth”.

According to the report, Telefónica remains in the outstanding group of leaders in terms of global reach and deployment capacity (24.3 million IoT connections at the end of June 2020) and highlights other capabilities:

• The aggressiveness in LPWA technologies deploying both NB-IoT and LTE-M in Europe and takes the lead in Latin America where almost no other operators have moved yet. It also notes some good wins in private 5G networks Telefónica has also secured some good wins in private 5G networks in Brazil, Germany and Spain.  
• The innovative approach to developing connectors between the various elements of device, networks, cloud and solutions/analytics, evolving it for further future differentiators, for instance including edge computing capabilities.
• The consolidation of their portfolio based on five main industries: Mobility, Retail, Energy, Industry and Smart Cities, where Telefónica has also global systems integration capabilities and an extensive Big Data/Analytics/IoT consulting team.

“We are working in the evolution of our vision to take IoT and Big Data Services to a next level, creating an independent, flexible and faster organization and a more comprehensive approach to the market. This is a game changer and our value proposition stands out because we offer complete and extensive end-to-end IOT solutions, combined with our capabilities in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. We help and support our customers in all that journey, from sensors to value extracted from data.” says Gonzalo Martín-Villa, Global Director of IoT and Big Data at Telefónica Tech.

Finally, Transforma Insights also highlights Telefónica’s IoT security centered strategy through its collaboration with ElevenPaths, Telefónica Tech’s cybersecurity company, and notes the recent investment in Nozomi, a leading OT and IoT security company, as well as its collaboration with Subex on a solution for threat detection analysing IoT traffic on networks.