Nokia doubled down on its Internet of Things platform Tuesday, launching a set of new applications, capabilities, and connectivity options aimed at speeding IoT deployments.
Built on the company’s Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things (IMPACT) launched in June 2016, the upgrades provide users with pre-integrated applications for the public sector/smart city and transportation/automotive verticals. IMPACT also now includes analytics capabilities powered by Nokia Bell Labs’ machine learning algorithms and comes with new connectivity options including licensed NB-IoT and unlicensed LoRa.
“We created the platform about half a year ago, so it’s exciting to see that we now can work on rounding out the offers,” Frank Ploumen, CTO of IoT Platform and Applications at Nokia, said. “Creating these solutions really makes it much more tangible for people to use it. It’s one thing to say we have a great platform, it’s another thing to say here’s a solution to a real world problem and by the way it’s leveraging this great platform underneath that lets you do so much more.”
According to Nokia, new IMPACT applications include a smart parking application that provides real-time information on parking availability and a payment process; a smart lighting application that automatically detects lighting issues and failures; and vehicle applications that enable predictive maintenance and geo-fencing, as well as oversight of vehicle stats like fuel levels, speed, and GPS location.
Ploumen noted IMPACT also now includes a video analytics capability that has been in development for the past five years at Nokia Bell Labs. Unlike a traditional approach, Ploumen explained Nokia’s video analytics tool looks at video data in an abstract way, tracking things like pixel patterns and learning what’s normal through unsupervised observation. That way, the program can identify anomalies in traffic conditions, crowd behavior, and other settings and trigger real time alerts where necessary.
Ploumen disclosed the video solution is already in live trials in a number of North American cities, focusing mainly on street scenes, but said Nokia has also received requests for the capability from large venues like stadiums and airports.
Ploumen explained all of the aforementioned solutions are built to fall into Nokia’s five key verticals – cities, utilities, public safety, health, and automotive – and noted these particular applications are aimed mainly at enterprises and government agencies (like city governments). Though he couldn’t disclose what other solutions Nokia is currently working on, he said they will fall into some of the other verticals Nokia is focused on, such as health.
“The intent here is to create solutions that are either ready to go or almost ready to go with minimal customization as the customer requires, so it is very much focused on solving real world problems and minimizing time to build these solutions,” he said. “This is a complete turnkey package ready to go, ready to solve a real world problem out of the box.”
Ploumen also reported IMPACT expanded its connectivity suite from just Lightweight M2M and Cat-M1 to add support for NB-IoT and LoRa in a move he said will help with deployment costs.
“So far IoT as a domain has used general purpose networking technologies – so we’ve used 3G, LTE, 2G in some cases, we’ve used fixed networking technologies,” he commented. “We now start to see the industry creating dedicated radio technology that’s optimized for IoT, so this is where low-power wide-area technologies come in. We’re very excited to support some of these technologies out of the box … I think it’s going to really improve the cost to deliver these solutions end-to-end.”
Nokia said the upgraded version of its IMPACT IoT platform is expected to become available around the globe in the second quarter of this year.
