IBM Bets Big on IoT

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The Internet of Things (IoT) offers the promise of billions of connected devices around the world, enabling a new era of connectivity and device control. IoT also represents a new opportunity for IT vendors to grow, which is why IBM is now set to invest heavily.

IBM announced today a new four year effort to expand its IoT research and products. The new IBM IoT business unit will be led by Pat Toole, who will be the General Manager of the business. IBM will be investing $3 billion into the IoT effort, in part to help grow its analytics capabilities such that organizations can benefit from the intelligence that connected devices can provide. According to IBM, as much as 90 percent of data that is generated by connected devices is never acted on or analyzed.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics, said in a statement.

To help benefit from IoT, IBM is now launching multiple new platforms and analytics services. One of the new services is the IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries. The purpose of the platform is about providing analytic services that are specific to a given industry vertical. As an example, IBM said that an insurance company could get information from a connected vehicle.

For developers, the new IBM Bluemix IoT Zone is an effort to enable IoT data and analytics to be integrated into applications. Bluemix is IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) technology that is based on the open-source Cloud Foundry project. IBM is also a founding member of the CloudFoundry Foundation which was launched in December of 2014.

According to IBM, developers will be able to integrate real-time data and device analytics to automate and optimize multiple classes of business applications, including, enterprise asset management, facilities management, and software engineering design tools.

As a customer proof point for the new IoT push, IBM has also announced a partnership with The Weather Company. As part of the partnership, the Weather Company’s weather data services platform will migrate to the IBM Cloud. Additionally the Weather Company will leverage IBM analytics and cloud services for data collected from its array of sensors deployed around the world.

“There’s an opportunity to inform all business operations and decision-making with real-time actionable insight delivered securely via the cloud and extracted from all this data collected from sensors all over the planet,” Picciano said. “The Weather Company and IBM partnership can be a catalyst to making critical business systems even smarter.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Datamation and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist

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