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IBM, ARM link arms on Internet of Things analytics

The two firms plan to improve data analysis relating to IoT devices across a variety of industries.

Written by Charlie Osborne, Contributing Writer Sept. 3, 2015 at 12:34 a.m. PT

IBM and ARM are joining forces to boost Internet of Things (IoT) device analytics capabilities across the industrial, weather and wearable industries, among others.

On Thursday, IBM and ARM announced plans to integrate the IBM Internet of Things (IoT) platform, dubbed IBM IoT Foundation, with ARM technology. Specifically, the platform will now connect ARM mbed users directly to IBM IoT Foundation analytics.

Products powered by ARM mbed-enabled chips can now automatically register with IBM's platform, and information collected will be delivered to the cloud for analysis. The connection also gives manufacturers the option to include the delivery of events to users, such as remote equipment control or alert sending, such as in the case of device breakdowns.

The IBM IoT Foundation includes tools to manage and analyze rapidly-moving data, security systems to protect IoT device-gathered information and access to IBM Bluemix, the firm's Platform-as-a-Service which handles data flow.

According to the firms, "this fusion will allow huge quantities of data from devices such as industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analyzed and acted upon."

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In addition to the announcement, IBM has also revealed IoT for Electronics, the first in a series of services due for release which focus on industry-specific IoT products. Big Blue claims the service will give electronics manufacturers better capabilities in gathering data collected by IoT device sensors, which can then be combined with other data for the purpose of real-time analytics.

"We're excited to work with IBM because we believe that an effective IoT solution should be built from the ground up -- from chipset through services -- and is by far the best choice to have a complete end-to-end solution," said Earl Qua, Vice President of Ionics.

"Working with IBM we have tapped into our respective company's expertise to create a platform that is built and customized for the unique nature in which companies are utilizing IoT."

This week, IBM and French firm GENCI said they are combining resources to develop exascale computing, which would theoretically be a thousand times more powerful than a petabyte scale computer and capable of performing one exaflop of calculations per second.