Qualcomm talks up its ‘IoT-as-a-Service’ offering

US embedded chip giant Qualcomm reasserted its smart city ambitions with an update of its IoT Services Suite platform.

It was actually launched last year but with insufficient fanfare for us to cover it. Maybe Qualcomm deliberately kept it quiet to give it a chance to find its feet, but progress has apparently been good enough to warrant a special press release now. IoT as-a-Service (IoTaaS) isn’t a term coined by Qualcomm but it is a concept the company seems keep to be strongly associated with.

“To directly address the fragmented nature of the IoT industry, our Qualcomm IoT Services Suite offering is helping to bridge the gap for IoT service providers and entities looking to efficiently and effectively deploy smart solutions,” said Sanjeet Pandit, Head of Smart Cities at Qualcomm. “In just one year, the offering has grown beyond our expectations, and we are proud of the interest we have attained and the shift in mentality we have driven to meet the needs of smart solutions across multiple industries beyond just smart cities.”

As the name implies IoTaaS is designed to entice organisations into giving IoT a go by lowering the barriers to entry. Mainly this means reducing the hassle and expense of installing a bunch of IoT sensors in the wild and processing the data you get from them. Qualcomm clearly loves a bit of aaS as it’s also offering inspection, asset management, traffic management and smart venues on the same basis.

All this stuff was explored at length at the third Smart Cities Accelerate event, held at Qualcomm towers in San Diego. They even filmed the main keynote, which included basketball legend Magic Johnson because he’s into this sort of thing these days. Here it is in all its glory, you lucky things.