Summary Bullets:

• In H2 2023, there were fewer public announcements of new services leveraging IoT from ITSPs than in previous periods.

• IoT is not new (or as exciting as AI) and so is not frequently featured in press releases these days. However, as 5G/5G SA, FWA, private networks and IoT-enabled sustainability use cases were positive enablers of IoT momentum in 2023, IoT remains important to both mobile operators and ITSPs.

IT Service Provider IoT Announcements in 2023

• December 2023: Accenture and Mujin established Accenture Alpha Automation, a JV for the manufacturing and logistics industries. It will help companies automate management infrastructure with solutions that combine data from manufacturing and logistics operations with management data. The JV is owned 70% by Accenture and 30% by Mujin.

• December 2023: In Q4 2023, Cognizant noted that it will continue to invest in IoT, citing success in using IoT to instrument functions for factories, real estate, fleets, and products to increase access to insight-generating data. Cognizant describes AI, automation, data modernization, and IoT as putting data at the core of customer operations and helping to improve experiences they offer to their customers, tap into new revenue streams, automate operations, defend against competitors, and reduce costs.

• September 2023: Kyndryl Japan is supporting Taisei Corporation’s smart building transformation business through developing and managing its public cloud environment, and by supporting the development and management of LifeCycleOS, the company’s building platform that brings together building information modeling (BIM) and Internet of Things (IoT).

• August 2023: Following Atos’ decision to spin off services into a new brand called Eviden, and with plans to sell off the IT infrastructure unit of Atos (Tech Foundations), IoT will fall under the Eviden brand as it is considered a digital transformation technology.

• August 2023: Infosys set up a first Makers Lab at Dr APJ Abdul Kalam University in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, India. The lab will have capabilities ranging across AI, IoT, robotics, and 3D printers.

• April 2023: Cognizant announced its purchase of Mobica, a UK-based IoT software engineering services company. Mobica has been a strategic partner for connected software engineering services across the technology stack to technology-driven market leaders. For Cognizant, this also boosts nearshoring capabilities in Eastern Europe.

• April 2023: Capgemini was selected to coordinate IoT-NGIN, the Next Generation IoT project, part of the European Commission’s Next Generation Internet initiative to reinvent the Internet for the third millennium. IoT has been identified by the European Commission as a technology at the forefront of digital transformation for the economy.

• March 2023: The global standard for IoT security, the ioXt Alliance, announced the addition of Capgemini to the ioXt Authorized Labs certification program. Authorized labs are the exclusive third-party test providers for the ioXt Alliance, performing testing required for IoT devices to be certified by ioXt.

• March 2023: Accenture announced it is acquiring Flutura, an IoT and data science services firm. This will boost the industrial AI services that Accenture sells under the umbrella of its Applied Intelligence unit.

• February 2023: Infosys rolled out Private 5G-as-a-Service to accelerate business value for its enterprise clients. It includes mobile edge computing for reliable network operation for high-bandwidth enterprise use cases including a variety of IoT/industrial IoT applications.

These announcements show that in H1 2023, ITSPs struck alliances or made acquisitions to expand vertical expertise and ability to use adjacent technologies to enrich IoT solutions. Acquisitions such as Flutura by Accenture, Mobica by Cognizant, and Atos’ still-in-progress spin-off of its legacy IT services company, with IoT to be an element in a new services group, show the importance of IoT to enhance digital transformation as a complementary technology to analytics, AI, edge computing, blockchain, and hybrid cloud. The role of ITSPs in making IoT and other complex technologies easier to use while solving business problems remains very important. For more insights into the market please see GlobalData report, IT Service Provider IoT Services.