Internet of Things (IoT) is the latest buzzword that has reached the heights of its hype. Last year, it topped the list of
Last week IBM was in the news for announcing $3 Billion investment for IoT. The company also partnered with The Weather Company to bring accurate weather forecast. Despite the buzz, many don’t perceive IBM as the agile company that can move fast enough to the changing dynamics. IoT is an emerging technology that demands a different approach. It bridges the gap between consumer technology and the traditional, boring enterprise IT. When IoT becomes mainstream, the line between consumers and enterprises will be blurred. Wearables become the de facto front ends to deal with complex business processes that are a part of mission critical systems. So, what role will IBM play in this new twilight zone?
Before the skeptics write off IBM as an old school entity that may be too slow to embrace the latest and greatest, here are five reasons why the company is relevant even in the era of IoT and wearables.
Cloud Infrastructure - SoftLayer
The “things” in the Internet of Things represent just the tip of the iceberg. The heavy lifting is obviously done by backend infrastructure. The data generated by the sensors and devices needs to be ingested in real-time. Industrial IoT requires massive infrastructure running powerful compute and storage engines. IBM’s investment in SoftLayer instantly turned it into an IaaS player giving the company the muscle to compete with Amazon and
Cloud Platform - Bluemix
IBM was late to the PaaS party. In February 2014, IBM announced Bluemix, a flavour of Cloud Foundry open source PaaS. Running on SoftLayer, IBM’s PaaS comes across as a contemporary platform aligned with modern use cases and scenarios. Bluemix acts as a mobile backend for hosting the backend of mobile and wearable applications. What’s impressive is that IBM’s PaaS is one of the first to support native IoT protocols like MQTT, Message Queue Telemetry Transport, which is a lightweight pub/sub protocol designed for low processor/bandwidth units like sensors. IBM has been heavily backing MQTT as the standard protocol for IoT. With Bluemix and MQTT, it is easy for developers to wire up devices and gateways to send data straight to the cloud. Enterprises can get started with Bluemix for prototyping and move to SoftLayer when their solution demands access to raw computing power.
Analytics - Watson
Watson is the secret sauce and the key differentiating factor of IBM’s IoT stack. Powered by IBM’s DeepQA and
Developer Tools and Ecosystem - Node-Red and IoT Foundation
IBM has invested in various tools to simplify IoT development. Its biggest contribution came in the form of Node-Red, a rapid application development tool to wire up sensors, devices, gateways and cloud services. It democratizes IoT development by bringing the simplicity of Visual Basic to IoT development. Developers can drag, drop and connect a set of blocks, each representing an IoT element with a variety of APIs. Then comes IoT Foundation which is a playground to prototype and test connected devices. The service aims to connect, collect, assemble and manage IoT applications. There are dozens of blueprints – which IBM calls as recipes – for popular IoT environments such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Intel Galileo. IoT Foundation abstracts all the elements of IBM platform to provide a unified layer to developers.
Partnerships and Alliances - Apple, AT&T, ARM, Cisco and more
Last year IBM announced that it is partnering with Apple to develop enterprise apps on iOS. Demonstrating the progress they made, both the companies launched 100+ iOS business applications earlier this year. With Apple’s aggressive pushing into wearables market, IBM will obviously become the preferred partner to develop enterprise apps on Apple Watch. This will help IBM get a leg up over the competition.
IBM has a history of creating consortiums and actively contributing to it. In its true style, the company along with AT&T, Cisco, GE and Intel announced The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). The goal of IIC is to create industry use cases, reference architectures, and best practices for building connected solutions.
Earlier this month, ARM launched mbed IoT Starter Kit that talks to IBM’s Bluemix. ARM’s Cortex family of microcontrollers and processors power popular IoT platforms such as Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black. This partnership will give IBM access to a large ecosystem of developers and startups building IoT solutions.
Summary
If IBM manages to get the best out of its recent investments, it stands a chance to become a formidable force in the IoT segment. But as we have seen in the past, it is not an easy feat for the company to make disparate product teams, multiple functional groups, and business units to rally around one strategy.
