The New York-based American multinational technology giant – IBM (International Business Machine) Corporation will finance US$3 billion over four years to establish a new business unit committed to providing “Internet of Things” IoT systems and services to enterprises.
With a new IoT unit, IBM is targeting to sell its expertise in collecting and creating a sense of the surge in real-time data.
The IBM director of analytics – Erick Brethenoux said, “We’re only at the very beginning of an amazing revolution. If we thought we were dealing with big data now, we haven’t seen anything yet.”
The new IoT unit will be supervised by IBM General Manager, Chris O’Connor, which will initially court enterprises in travel, insurance, transportation, logistics, retail, and public utilities, Erick said.
Brethenoux also said that the company will also promo a new cloud service, the IBM IoT Open Cloud Platform, providing a way for initiatives to shape their own data-driven systems. Once done, IBM will also develop dedicated packages for specific areas like the insurance industry.
The company is also looking forward to offering a customized section of its Bluemix platform service to be called, the Bluemix IoT Zone, where developers will be able to build specialized business logic to handle and evaluate data streaming from IoT devices and sensors.
IBM will also team up with partner firms in a range of industries to support more diligently in all aspects of IoT, from hardware to data. It has contracted deals with AT&T, Chip design firm ARM, and semiconductor maker Semtech.
Whereas, another partner is the Weather Company, which will offer access to a rich trove of data to it, can be consumed by other systems. Foretelling maintenance systems could use weather records and estimates to determine when gear needs to be tuned, for instance.
The president of the Weather Co.’s WSI division – Mark Gildersleeve said, “Most people, most businesses, most governments wait for the weather to happen to them and react to it rather than anticipate what it will do to them.”
IDC has estimated that by 2021, around 28 billion IoT devices will be installed all around the globe. General Electronics has predicted that over the next 20 years, IoT systems will add up to $15 trillion to global annual GDP (Gross Domestic Product.)
IoT is the new arena, where IBM is targeting to blow new life into its business, which has been struggling into sales from some of its outdated on-premises products, mainly hardware, failure. Just last month, the company said it would invest $4 billion in Cloud Computing, mobile and analytics technologies.
IBM says work done by the company in its Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities enterprises has armed it for the developing IoT field. Many of these activities require network-connected remote arrangement and analytics systems, Erick said.
The Police Department of Durham, North California, and Memphis, Tennessee work with IBM to assemble data that can help them enhanced target crime hotspots. And Carnegie Mellon University and the U.S. General Services Administration are functioning with IBM to build an IoT system that can drive costs on their houses.
Add Comment