Smart water infrastructure is moving from pilot projects to long-life operational systems, and that shift changes the technical conversation. Utility and water-authority leaders are no longer buying isolated devices. Instead, they are investing in digital infrastructure that may need to operate, interconnect, and evolve for 10 to 20 years.

At the same time, IoT vendors are being asked to support more demanding procurement requirements, tighter integration expectations, and broader ecosystem compatibility. In that environment, the question is no longer whether water networks will become connected. The question is whether they will become interoperable.

That is why open IoT profiles matter.

Analysts at Transforma Insights project that smart water meter connections will grow from about 414 million in 2025 to roughly 908 million by 2035, more than doubling over the next decade. MarketsandMarkets projects that the global smart water meters market will grow from USD 4.61 billion in 2024 to USD 9.04 billion by 2030, representing an 11.9% compound annual growth rate. Those numbers point to a simple conclusion: the industry is scaling quickly, and architecture decisions made now will shape how manageable that scale becomes later.

For vendors, this growth creates opportunity, but it also raises the cost of fragmentation. For utilities and water authorities, it increases the risk of technical lock-in, brittle integrations, and procurement processes that promise openness without delivering it in practice. Future-proofing smart water infrastructure requires more than adding sensors, radios, and dashboards. It requires a common, machine-readable way to describe device behavior, telemetry, management functions, and interoperability expectations.

Why scale exposes weak architecture

Many first-generation smart water projects were designed as narrow deployments. A utility might deploy one vendor's meters in one district, connect them to one head-end, and use a custom integration path into billing or analytics systems. That can work at pilot scale. It often breaks down at operational scale.

As deployments expand, utilities want to add new meter types, support different communication technologies, compare performance across vendors, and integrate with broader digital infrastructure. They may also need to connect leak detection, service assurance, customer portals, water quality monitoring, and asset performance analytics. Industry analysis of smart water infrastructure describes these environments as increasingly dependent on IoT devices, sensors, connectivity, real-time monitoring, analytics, AI, and operational dashboards working together across the stack. The broader and more distributed the system becomes, the more costly every custom interface becomes.

This is where weak architecture shows up. A system that looks open because it uses IP connectivity can still be operationally closed if every data model, alarm format, provisioning workflow, or firmware process is vendor-specific. Connectivity alone does not produce interoperability. A utility can deploy NB-IoT, LTE-M, LoRaWAN, or another communications technology and still end up with siloed systems at the application layer. That is one reason application-layer standardization is becoming more strategically important than the specific radio selected for a given deployment.

Open profiles create reusable behavior

An open IoT profile defines how devices and platforms should represent and exchange information in a consistent way. In practice, that means the market can align on common objects, attributes, resources, telemetry patterns, lifecycle controls, and behavioral expectations. Instead of every deployment inventing its own schema and control model, a profile creates a stable target for implementation and testing.

For vendors, that target matters. It reduces the amount of custom engineering required for each utility deployment. It clarifies the minimum interoperable feature set. It makes product planning more predictable because product teams can design against a published profile rather than a rolling collection of customer-specific interface requests. It also creates a clearer path for test automation and interoperability validation.

For utilities and water authorities, the benefit is different but equally important. A profile provides a way to convert policy goals — such as openness, resilience, portability, and competition — into technical procurement language. Instead of requesting a vaguely open solution, a utility can require conformance to a defined profile and ask for evidence that meters and platforms implement the same structured behaviors. That improves accountability in tenders and makes multi-vendor strategies more realistic.

For service providers, system integrators, and head-end platform vendors, a published profile can mean the difference between building once and building per meter vendor. A shared server-side model reduces repetitive integration work, supports genuinely multi-vendor managed services, and allows differentiation on analytics, security, operations, and service quality rather than on proprietary integration glue.

For mobile network operators, the value is equally concrete. NB-IoT and LTE-M operators already provide the bearers many water deployments rely on. A common profile helps align bootstrap and onboarding flows, connectivity monitoring, and eSIM-driven fleet operations across multi-vendor device populations. It also gives operators a reason to shape the profile around the network features they control, including power-saving behavior and cellular session resilience.

This is the strategic value behind initiatives such as Water 2.0 in OMA's Utilities Working Group. The goal is not to create another abstract standards document detached from deployment reality. The goal is to define a vendor-neutral conformance profile for smart water metering, based on LwM2M v1.2+, that gives utilities and vendors a common framework for device and platform interoperability.

Concretely, that profile builds on the LwM2M data model already published in the OMNA registry — the Water Meter object alongside the Device, Firmware Update, and Connectivity Monitoring objects — and on the device-management mechanics that suit battery-powered, pit-mounted meters: device-initiated Send rather than server polling, Queue Mode for sleepy endpoints, compact SenML-CBOR and LwM2M-CBOR encodings, and DTLS Connection ID to survive NAT rebinding on cellular networks. These are the parts of LwM2M that turn an "open profile" from an aspiration into a testable specification.

Why machine-readable standards matter

There is also a practical reason to make this work machine-readable.

When device models, interfaces, and conformance expectations are expressed in structured, standardized form, they become easier to ingest into engineering toolchains, test harnesses, procurement templates, digital twins, and increasingly, LLM-assisted workflows. A machine-readable profile is easier to validate automatically, easier to map across products, and easier to reference in integration pipelines.

LwM2M makes this concrete: every Object is defined as a machine-readable DDF XML file in the OMNA registry, so a Water 2.0 profile is consumable by tooling the day it is published rather than after someone hand-transcribes a PDF.

This matters for two reasons.

First, utilities are managing larger and more heterogeneous estates. A structured profile supports repeatable onboarding, inventory visibility, configuration consistency, and automated validation across thousands or millions of endpoints. Second, vendors are increasingly using AI-enabled internal tools for requirements analysis, code generation support, test generation, technical documentation, and bid response preparation. The cleaner and more structured the specification baseline, the more effectively those workflows can operate.

In other words, machine readability is no longer a side benefit. It is becoming part of how digital infrastructure is designed, procured, implemented, and governed.

Procurement is now a systems design issue

Policy-oriented utility and water-authority leadership often approaches smart water modernization through outcomes: resilience, sustainability, operational efficiency, customer service, and fiscal responsibility. Those outcomes are valid, but they cannot be separated from technical architecture.

If a utility wants supplier diversity, it needs interoperable profiles. If it wants long-term competition, it needs portable interfaces. If it wants lower lifecycle cost, it needs a reduced dependency on custom integration. Procurement language that ignores these issues effectively pushes systems design decisions to individual vendors, where they often become opaque.

The market is already moving fast enough that these choices are becoming harder to reverse later. Transforma Insights' forecast of 908 million smart water meter connections by 2035 suggests that smart water is not a niche modernization path but a mainstream infrastructure category. At the same time, the market's projected growth to USD 9.04 billion by 2030 indicates that vendor ecosystems, component options, and platform choices will keep expanding. That is good for innovation, but only if utilities can adopt new products without rewriting their entire integration layer.

Open profiles help make that possible. They let utilities procure for outcomes while still anchoring those outcomes in technical conformance. They let vendors compete on battery life, sensing accuracy, radio performance, analytics, security implementation, and service quality rather than relying on proprietary lock-in as a business model.

What vendors should do now

For IoT vendors, the strategic response is not just to support one more protocol. It is to align product design with reusable interoperability models.

A practical vendor roadmap includes five actions:

• Map current device capabilities to standardized object models and management functions.
• Separate transport choices from application-layer interoperability strategy.
• Build conformance testing into the product lifecycle rather than treating integration as a post-sale exercise.
• Prepare structured technical documentation that procurement teams and engineering teams can both consume.
• Participate in profile-defining working groups early, before procurement language hardens around expectations not shaped by your team.

The vendors that benefit most from profile-driven markets are usually the ones that treat standards participation as product strategy, not just regulatory overhead.

What utilities and water authorities should do now

For utility and water-authority leaders, the next step is to move beyond generic calls for open standards and specify what interoperability should mean operationally.

A practical utility roadmap includes five actions:

• Require structured, standards-based device models in upcoming tenders.
• Ask vendors for conformance evidence, not only compliance statements.
• Evaluate lifecycle interoperability, including onboarding, firmware updates, fault reporting, and data export.
• Design procurement around multi-vendor coexistence from the start.
• Engage with standards bodies and industry groups that are shaping utility-specific profiles.

This approach supports both public-interest goals and engineering realism. It helps public agencies avoid stranded investments while making it easier to scale successful pilots into durable infrastructure programs.

The next decade will reward interoperability discipline

The smart water sector is entering a phase where scale, complexity, and policy expectations are all increasing at once. Smart water infrastructure will only become more valuable as utilities connect metering, leak detection, treatment, quality monitoring, and customer-facing systems into a more unified operational model. But that value will be constrained if the underlying architecture remains fragmented.

Future-proof infrastructure is not infrastructure that predicts every future use case. It is infrastructure that can absorb change without excessive reintegration. Open IoT profiles provide one of the clearest paths to that outcome. They give vendors a repeatable implementation target, give utilities a stronger procurement foundation, and give the broader ecosystem a basis for real interoperability at scale.

That is the larger promise behind Water 2.0 and similar efforts. In the coming decade, the winning smart water strategies will not be the ones with the most devices. They will be the ones with the most portable, testable, and interoperable digital foundations.

Get involved in Water 2.0

The Water 2.0 conformance profile, its test cases, and implementation guidance are being defined now in OMA's Utilities Working Group. The work is contribution-driven, focused on interoperability, and intended to respond directly to utility procurement needs and vendor implementation realities.

Utilities and water authorities, meter vendors, platform and service providers, and mobile network operators all have concrete reasons to shape the profile while it is still being defined. Decisions made in this phase can influence procurement language, implementation targets, and interoperability expectations for years to come. OMA's current materials position the Utilities Working Group as an open forum for utility domain experts, device vendors, and platform providers, with Water 2.0 as its initial emphasis.

Learn more about Water 2.0 and the OMA Utilities Working Group