Vodafone’s IoT business is enjoying the freedom and flexibility from becoming a separate business a year ago, according to Marc Sauter, head of IoT product management, speaking at last week’s Embedded World in Nuremberg.

Though still 100% owned by Vodafone, the IoT business is completely independent, said Sauter.

“This helps us accelerate our growth,” he said. “We have the opportunity and flexibility to invest in our future growth.”

The IoT business connects more than 190 million devices worldwide, operates in 180 countries across the globe, using 760 networks worldwide, with access to 110 LPWA networks.

As a standalone company, Vodafone IoT is dedicated to hyperscaling IoT connectivity with the flexibility to operate and build its own ecosystem, supporting customers on their digital transformation journey and accelerating growth. Going forward, Sauter said it would continue to hyperscale to cement its position connecting everything, everywhere with secure, simple and scalable products and services.

“We consider ourselves the market leader in IoT connectivity,” said Sauter. “Gartner agrees. But as leader, we have a mission to drive IoT adoption. Our vision is to hyperscale IoT connections.”

He said Vodafone (www.vodafone.com) worked across all verticals, from automotive to utilities, healthcare, agriculture, sensors, metering and logistics.

“We cover all the verticals,” he said. This ranges from small companies monitoring water pipes to one with twenty million connections. “This shows the breadth of the use cases we serve,” he said.

He also said the company was adopting AI. “There is a lot of talk about AI,” he said. “We are using AI to make our products better in anomaly detection and machine learning. IoT is an enabler for AI. AI analyses the data, which is why we are seeing AI at the edge.”