Nokia is updating its Internet of Things (IoT) platform, called Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things (Impact). The goal is to make it easier for customers to deploy new services for IoT such as smart parking, smart lighting, and connected cars.

Nokia Impact was first launched in June 2016 to give service providers, enterprises, and government organizations a standards-based platform to build and scale IoT services. The platform manages data collection, event processing, device management, data contextualization, data analytics, and applications enablement for any device.

“We are now looking at how we can use this platform to create vertically focused solutions based upon this horizontal platform,” says Frank Ploumen, CTO of IoT Platform and Applications at Nokia.

The updated version of the platform focuses on providing an end-to-end system for five verticals — smart cities, utilities, public safety, health, and automotive — and comes with pre-integrated applications allowing users to create and deploy IoT services.

The updated platform uses Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and LoRa for connectivity, which builds on existing LTE Category M1 (also known as CAT-M) device support. Support for licensed NB-IoT and unlicensed LoRa networks provide customers with additional IoT network options.

LTE isn’t the most efficient way to get IoT traffic across the network, Ploumen says. LoRa uses unlicensed spectrum to provide IoT connectivity, but neither technology is natively IP-based. What Impact does is convert the traffic to IP at the edge of the network. Impact has NB-IoT and LoRa to make non-IP networks addressable by IP-based applications, Ploumen claims.

The IoT platform is also equipped with video analytics powered by Nokia Bell Labs’ machine learning. It’s meant to detect anomalies in video feeds, such as traffic accidents, speeding vehicles, and unauthorized entry into secure locations.

Impact’s smart parking application, smart lighting application, and vehicle applications allow municipalities and users to better manage things like traffic, parking spaces, electricity use, lighting failures, and individual vehicle data.