IBM Announces $3 Billion IoT Initiative

IBM has announced that it plans to spend $3 billion over the next four years to establish a new Internet of Things (IoT) business unit, and that it is building a cloud-based open platform designed to help clients and ecosystem partners build IoT solutions.

These resources will be made available on an open platform to provide manufacturers with the ability to design and produce connected devices that are optimized for the IoT, and to help industries create systems that combine enterprise and IoT data to inform decision-making. 

According to the announcement, IBM estimates that 90 percent of all data generated by devices such as smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances is never analyzed or acted on. As much as 60 percent of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated.

- IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries: This platform will provide new analytics services that clients, partners and IBM will use to design and deliver vertical industry IoT solutions. For example, IBM will introduce a cloud-based service that can help insurance companies extract insight from connected vehicles. This will enable new, more dynamic pricing models and the delivery of services that can be highly customized to individual drivers.

- IBM Bluemix IoT Zone: New IoT services as part of IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service will enable developers to integrate IoT data into cloud-based development and deployment of IoT apps. Developers will be able to enrich existing business applications – such as enterprise asset management, facilities management, and software engineering design tools – by infusing more real-time data and embedded analytics to further automate and optimize mission-critical IoT processes.

- IBM IoT Ecosystem: Expansion of its ecosystem of IoT partners – from silicon and device manufacturers to industry-oriented solution providers – such as AT&T, ARM, Semtech and newly announced The Weather Company – to ensure the secure and seamless integration of data services and solutions on IBM’s open platform.

IBM also has partnered with a number of IoT ecosystem leaders, with more to come. These include:

- AT&T and IBM combined their analytic platforms, cloud, and security technologies to gain more insights on data collected from machines in a variety of industries.

- ARM and IBM partnered to combine ARM’s leadership in the embedded market utilizing the ARM mbed platform with IBM’s leadership in Big Data, Analytics and Cloud Services to provide an easy to use Starter kit, enabling IoT developers to achieve end to end development from device through cloud services.

- IBM Research and Semtech announced a new technology based on low-power, wide-area networks that offers significant advantages over cellular networks and wifi for providing machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.  

- ESRI, which offers Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, has a long history of collaborating with IBM on the development of IoT solutions that bring mapping and spatial analysis to businesses and government institutions around the globe.