So during last week's IoT World Forum in Chicago more than the 1,500 Internet of Things (IoT) industry experts came together for the second annual conference. The IoT is opening up a world of real opportunities for service provider growth while rapidly transforming our communities, our cities, and our daily lives. Still as discussed during many of the sessions at the IoT World Forum, there are a number of questions that need to be answered to accelerate IoT globally.

• #1 Concern is Security -New way of thinking "don't trust, verify"
• #2 Faster Time-To-Market (TTM)
• #3 Lower TCO
• Another top reason was the need for improved asset utilization and risk management.

So during the break-out session the"The Value Delivered by the Service Provider in IoT"many attendees listened to service providers discuss how they are addressing these areas, and make money while doing it.

The Panel:

• AT&T SVP, Kevin Petersen -AT&T Digital Life
• Sprint Director, Mohammed Nasser -Connected City
• Orange Deputy Director, Fran?ois Duquesnoy - Orange Smart Cities & Territories
  

The Topics Covered:

Smart Home Security, Home Health Care, Home Automation, Energy, Connected Car, Telematics, Connected Agriculture, Connected Transportation, Asset Tracking, Cloud Delivery.

Figure 1 From L to R; Doug Webster VP of Cisco SP Marketing -moderator, Francois Duquesnoy Director Orange Smart Cities, Kevin Petersen President AT&T Digital Life Inc., Mohamad Nasser Sprint -Director of M2M Product and Marketing

Below are some key quotes overheard at the panel:

• "The IoT Market is still fragmented. Partners like Cisco are needed to bring that integrated experience to the customer."
• "Act small, but think big in IoT"
• "Developing a partner ecosystem is the key for Service Provider IoT success and growth. A service provider cannot go at IoT by themselves, or they will become the "dumb pipe" in IoT, and our value will diminish."
• "Partnering is essential -hardware, SI, SDP, Device Management Platform all are critical. We have partnerships with Cisco... device manufacturers as they are all key partnerships for us. "
• "It is important for the service provider to enhance the customer experience with the network, application partners, and ecosystem as those will be the key differentiators."

Figure 2 Service Provider Panel post interaction with attendees.

By partnering with service providers and Cisco, these concerns have been mitigated. Service provider offerings such as

• AT&T's Digital Life offer secure access control to home healthcare, home security, and home automation -partnering to expand internationally.
• Sprint's IoT & M2M offerings improve asset tracking and cloud based platform offer lowers TCO, deliver this same platform to enterprise customers globally.
• Orange Business Services delivers their application development platform to securely offer faster TTM for companies, enabling Smart Cities, expanding across their footprint.

Other IoT service offerings that have been enabled are tracked in the Cisco IoT World Forum 2014 Map:

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