Ericsson launches Connected Vehicle Marketplace

Ericsson has launched its Connected Vehicle Marketplace, with the cloud-based service aimed at allowing equipment manufacturers to share data and applications in a secure and scalable way with third parties.

Announced at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona on Monday morning, Ericsson's Connected Vehicle Marketplace will provide a single digital marketplace for open application programming interfaces (APIs) for telematics data, regulated data sharing, partner management, and charging and billing solutions, the networking giant said.

According to Ericsson CEO Börje Ekholm, the Connected Vehicle Marketplace is an essential part of Ericsson's strategy for enabling connectivity, security, and innovation across the automotive industry into the future.

The marketplace is powered by Ericsson's mobile connectivity management Internet of Things (IoT) solution IoT Accelerator.

Scania, the first customer to use Ericsson's automotive marketplace, also announced its Scania One digital platform, saying the solution would allow it to streamline processes for its fleet customers including public transport, long-haul transport, and construction transport providers.

"Compared to many other industries, the transport industry is making rapid progress in digitalisation," Scania CEO Henrik Henriksson said.

"Now we are taking some serious steps translating the partnership into real business for us with bottom-line impact for our customers."

Scania said it now has 250,000 connected vehicles -- more than two-thirds of its vehicles sold during the past five years -- with the total number of connected vehicles predicted to reach 382 million globally by 2025.

Ericsson has been actively working on connected cars trials, earlier this month attaining data transfer speeds of 3.6Gbps on connected cars travelling at 170km/h in partnership with SK Telecom and BMW across a test 5G network.