As a chipmaker, Qualcomm has “touched every segment of IoT, in some way, shape or form,” Sanjeet Pandit, Qualcomm senior director and global head of smart cities, said to reporters. “And now we are going beyond. We are going up the stack.” The services suites offer more than just Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or 5G connectivity Qualcomm has worked with industries to identify the necessary hardware, software and platforms necessary to make IoT projects work. The smart venues suite could, for example, apply to a football stadium, a concert hall or a variety of other venues. They all, however, have commonalities, such as the need for crowd management, ticketing, security, janitorial services, and food kiosks. The Qualcomm suite provides pre-certified, pre-integrated hardware for each of those elements of a smart venue, as well as a management dashboard. Qualcomm is offering tools to improve safety, device management, tracking, and visibility into materials and workflows for its smart construction suite, among other things. More specifically, that means managing devices like connected hard hats and thermal cameras on site. “We’re bringing in all these smarts from various ecosystem members, stitching this together, creating workflow automation under a private network and delivering an end-to-end package,” Pandit said. In addition to rolling out the vertical-specific offerings, Qualcomm announced improvements to the IoT Services Suite. The enhancements were added for governments and enterprises that may not have large software development teams. It now offers drag-and-drop deployment with low-code development, automated device onboarding and management, streamlined device configuration, a customizable user interface, and an integrated standard operating procedures workflow.
