By Jeff Baumgartner Light Reading
Canada’s Rogers Communications is going after the enterprise IoT market more aggressively as its business services unit plows ahead with the launch of a broad set of smart city and smart building services.
The new offerings, which focus on areas such as smart traffic, air-quality monitoring and water management in conjunction with a range of tech partners, follow some earlier enterprise IoT initiatives.
Rogers launched its first smart building IoT service in 2020 with 1Valet. The offering focused on the launch of a software-based smart building platform for residents, property managers and their staff that includes smartphone-based, hands-free digital building access, video guest verification and an opt-in facial recognition access system.
Rogers has been growing its IoT portfolio ever since, Tess Van Thielen, the company’s VP of advanced services, said in emailed responses to questions from Light Reading.
“Our involvement in this space led us to expand our offerings where we saw an opportunity to help Canadian companies from large enterprises, municipalities to small and medium businesses, leverage smart technology in achieving their business goals such as sustainability, operational efficiency and cost reduction,” Van Thielen explained.
The product launch should provide a new growth engine for Rogers’ commercial services unit. Among North American cable operators, Cox Communications (through Cox2M) and Comcast (via its MachineQ unit) are also heavily engaged in the IoT services game.