Verizon’s acquisition of Fleetmatics Group isn’t the first deal that involves a telco pushing into new internet-of-things (IoT) territory in the vehicle management space. In 2015, Orange acquired fleet management provider Ocean to strengthen its vehicle fleet management activities.

However, at $2.4 billion, the Fleetmatics deal is much bigger than most telcos have been willing to contemplate to date, underlining Verizon's commitment to the IoT space. But this deal won’t transform Verizon’s enterprise revenue composition overnight. While it will help improve Verizon's position in terms of IoT revenues, Fleetmatics had revenues of $285 million in 2015 – compared to Verizon’s $132 billion.

The price it is prepared to pay for Fleetmatics shows that Verizon expects to see impressive long-term benefits from the deal. Forrester expects that Verizon will ultimately extend Fleetmatics’ business model beyond global fleet and mobile workforce management solutions to more general tracking and tracing solutions for nonpowered objects like skips, agricultural equipment, machinery, and other connected assets.

Verizon has its work cut out: The acquisition is the easy part. But successful integration will be much harder, as this deal is about supporting customers with their business processes rather than just selling them new products.