Dennis Nikles, the new Managing Director of Vodafone IoT Americas, is getting used to autonomous taxi services.
“It’s a little bit terrifying, I agree. It’s a little bit strange, but it works,” enthuses the German executive, who until recently was employed as CEO of Deutsche Telekom IoT. “We had some special situations in traffic, with cars coming out of parking lots without looking left or right, and this car really did great. It’s really sophisticated.”
Nikles’ enthusiasm extends beyond that of a slightly terrified passenger. As the man spearheading the European telecoms giant’s push to becoming what it calls an “IoT hyperscaler”, the connectivity requirements for the growing networks of connected vehicle platforms across the US and beyond are also a professional interest.
Telematics and connected vehicle platforms are expanding quickly, helped by the increasing sophistication of in-car software and the rise of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems.
“Our key customers are Americas-based, with global connectivity demands,” he says. “This is our sweet spot, with our strong roaming footprint in the rest of the world, including our own networks here in Europe. Plus, we have an increasing share of local profiles on our GDSP [Global Data Service Platform – Vodafone’s centralised portal that gives customers control over their IoT devices].”
Certainly, Vodafone’s bold move to poach Nikles and set up an entirely new department dedicated to the Americas – a region where the European telco effectively ceased to operate as a MNO more than a decade ago – raised eyebrows in tech circles in October.
Yet for Vodafone IoT, the standalone IoT business spun out from Vodafone Group in 2024 to focus on servicing global fleets of connected devices, it makes perfect sense.
“Normally, Vodafone IoT is structured into functional departments. We have sales, operations, technology, commercial, and so on,” points out Nikles. “But since October, we also have a separate Americas region.”
The reason for this is clear: taken together, the Americas region is the largest global market for IoT. Although the company does not deal directly with many customers in the US, it is increasingly hoping to win a share of the business, especially from automotive firms.
Nikles says the company already counts a number of well-known self-driving taxi brands and electric vehicle manufacturers among its client base and is hoping to build on this.
For now, Nikles splits his time between Germany and the US, spending at least a week each month stateside. He plans to relocate permanently later this year, conditions permitting. The goal, he says, is to build a more local organisation that still draws on Vodafone’s global delivery centres in Europe and India, while giving US customers faster access to people and decision-making.
“We recognise there is some room for improvement in our customer experience in the US because serving customers with resources from Europe is not always optimal,” Nikles says. “It works, but from a time difference perspective and a cultural perspective, there is a difference.”
Vodafone has been quietly building up its US presence for some time. The company agreed a strategic partnership with US giant AT&T in 2019 to accelerate IoT connectivity in the automotive industry, and Nikles says it has built strong relationships with Verizon and T-Mobile too.
“At this point, we are not competing with local MNOs (mobile network operators) for domestic business in the US because we need to admit we do not have a USP there. We don’t have a network,” says Nikles. “We have strong strategic partnerships with big MNOs in the US.”
Nonetheless, Vodafone already has a significant amount of technical infrastructure in the region. The company has four packet gateways in the US which route and manage IoT traffic. Rapid growth has made upgrading and maintaining that infrastructure increasingly urgent.
Health is another key pillar of Vodafone IoT’s US strategy, anchored by long-standing customers that use cellular connectivity to support implanted medical devices, such as pacemakers, which transmit data back to hospitals via home-based gateways.
“These customers need a partner for global connectivity,” Nikles says. “Regulation in health doesn’t allow too many integrations with too many MNOs because this is a huge effort, and they need to recertify each device when they change network partner.”
Nikles says Vodafone IoT’s target use cases are those with mid- to high-data volumes, which also include video surveillance and live tracking for logistics firms.
Nikles brings to Vodafone a track record of turning scale into profit. During his tenure at Deutsche Telekom IoT, he oversaw growth from low double-digit revenues to nearly €500m, alongside a push to make the business profitable. Scale, he argues, remains decisive.
Vodafone now runs more than 220 million IoT connections on a single platform, a level that he says drives down unit costs and gives it room to invest in services beyond basic connectivity. In the US, the number is 30 million – a situation which Nikles says means the company has “horizontal” connectivity rather than being specialised for any specific vertical.
Yet Nikles is clear that connectivity alone will not be enough to sustain growth. New standards such as SGP.32, which make it easier for customers to switch between network profiles, threaten to erode traditional advantages in coverage and roaming.
“We have a global SIM which is using more than 700 networks all over the world. And, of course, with our roaming tables we can easily migrate traffic to each network,” he says. “But with SGP.32 the customer will get this flexibility. This is the reason why I say we need to find other USPs. We need to think about what is a convincing value proposition for our customers.”
To that end, the company is building out local technical consulting teams in the US and introducing new Customer Success Management roles, designed to embed Vodafone more deeply in customers’ operations. The aim is to move from being a connectivity supplier to what Nikles calls a “long-term partner”, helping clients navigate regulatory complexity, scale deployments, and manage risk.
Security is an unavoidable part of that conversation, particularly as IoT spreads into safety-critical systems such as vehicles and medical devices. Nikles argues that cellular connectivity remains inherently more secure than many alternatives and says Vodafone’s platforms use multiple layers of encryption and protection. Responsibility is shared, however. Vodafone secures data up to the point at which it is handed over to the customer; breaches, he notes, more often occur in applications than in network infrastructure.
Looking ahead, Nikles sees the convergence of IoT and artificial intelligence as the next major growth driver, especially in the US. Sensors generate vast volumes of data, but value increasingly comes from analysing that data in real time. Vodafone is investing in capabilities that help customers move data securely into their own systems and train AI models on top of it.
“Almost all of our customers are using AI in some form already,” he says, “even if levels of sophistication vary.”
This article originally appeared in the February issue of IoT Insider
