Category Archives: IoT

Cisco, Internet of Things, IoT, Kansas City, News & Analysis, Sprint, Stephen Bye, Wim Elfrink

Cisco, Sprint tapped for Kansas City IoT deployment

Kansas City is working with Cisco, Sprint and a range of partners on fa large-scale IoT deployment

Kansas City is working with Cisco, Sprint and a range of partners on fa large-scale IoT deployment

Kansas City, Missourim announced a deal with Cisco and Sprint that will see the municipality deploy an Internet of Things (IoT) platform it said will transform the urban services it offers citizens.

As part of the deal Cisco will offer up its Smart+Connected wireless networking and mobile app services and work with a group of partners to bring together an ecosystem to develop applications including smart lighting, digital kiosks, a development data portal, and smart water innovation development.

Some of the applications being developed by project partners include CityPost, which broadcasts real-time location-based information and alerts through a Smart City network powered on the street by interactive Smart Signs (city posts) and on smartphones, and a series of applications designed to enhance policing.

“It’s exciting to see forward looking cities like Kansas City driving innovations that enable cities to connect people, process, data and things, and bring the Internet of Everything to life,” said Wim Elfrink, executive vice president, industry solutions group, and chief globalisation officer for Cisco.

“Kansas City is empowering its citizens, helping them become more efficient and more productive, and the city is poised to create significant new economic value. We’re pleased to be part of the team that will deploy a Smart+Connected City framework,” Elfrink said.

Sprint will deploy Cisco hardware to build and manage a Wi-Fi network that will serve as the backbone of the connectivity platform.

“Sprint looks forward to playing an integral role in this ground-breaking initiative to bring greater connectivity across a wide range of business and consumer applications that support the Internet of Everything in our hometown,” said Stephen Bye, chief technology officer at Sprint. “Delivering Wi-Fi connectivity is a great fit for Sprint, and enables our customers to more easily use both cellular and Wi-Fi for a better mobile experience.”

The first phase of the project is due to kick off later this year, the municipality said.

Internet of Things, IoT, Juniper Research, M2M, News & Analysis

Juniper: Connected cars to be 20% of car market by 2019

Jupiter Research says the connected car is the fastest growing segment of the M2M market

Jupiter Research says the connected car is the fastest growing segment of the M2M market

Analyst firm Juniper Research has forecast the connected car market to grow faster than any other M2M segment and to account for a fifth of total passenger car revenue by 2019.

As part of a broader report on M2M, Juniper compares connected cars favourably to other fast-growing segments such as healthcare and retail. The firm reckons the overall M2M market will generate service revenues of over $40bn globally by 2019, which is twice the current amount.

As well as cars, Juniper believes smart metering is set to boom, fuelled by state efficiency and green initiatives, but it won’t generate the kind of revenues cars will.

“Both India and China are expected to see rapid adoption of smart metering as new metering infrastructure is installed and smart cities are created,” said Juniper analyst Anthony Cox.

Other observations include an acknowledgement of the growing importance of M&A in creating companies with the range of products and competences to create and commercialise innovative M2M and IoT products. Western markets are currently leading the way in M2M, but China is unsurprisingly set to be increasingly prominent. Lastly Juniper stressed the importance of big data analytics in getting the best out of M2M.

Altera, Brian Krzanich, Intel, Internet of Things, IoT, John Daane, M&A, News & Analysis

Intel joins IoT M&A frenzy with $17bn Altera acquisition

Intel is buying Altera for $17bn to strengthen its position in IoT

Intel is buying Altera for $17bn to strengthen its position in IoT

Chip giant Intel has wasted little time in joining the recent flurry of semiconductor M&A activity by acquiring embedded chip company Altera for $16.7 billion, reports Telecoms.com.

Altera specialises FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), which essentially are chips that can be reconfigured, making them useful for dynamic embedded environments such as software defined radio and whatever the Internet of Things eventually serves up. Intel believes this kind of technology can help it in the embedded space, where it often struggles to compete with more power efficient ARM-based products.

“With this acquisition, we will harness the power of Moore’s Law to make the next generation of solutions not just better, but able to do more,” said Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel. “Whether to enable new growth in the network, large cloud data centers or IoT segments, our customers expect better performance at lower costs. This is the promise of Moore’s Law and it’s the innovation enabled by Intel and Altera joining forces.”

“We believe that as part of Intel we will be able to develop innovative FPGAs and system-on-chips for our customers in all market segments,” said John Daane, President, CEO of Altera. “Together, we expect to drive meaningful value for our customers, partners and employees around the world.”

Intel has been getting serious about IoT for some time, especially when it became apparent how difficult getting into the smartphone market would be for it. Back in 2009 it bought embedded software company Wind River and it has recently broken out its IoT activities into a distinct reporting unit. Together with other acquisitions, such as cellular modem company Infineon, Intel is amassing a portfolio of silicon capabilities that could be combined into some highly versatile chips – just what you need when looking to future proof your embedded technology.

Golgi, Internet of Things, IoT, White Papers

The Internet of Things: Bridging the gap between devices and developers with cloud services

Golgi_white_paper_ofcnewThe Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the most disruptive trends in technology today but as IoT services start to hit the mainstream, the sometimes conflicting requirements of device manufacturers and developers are beginning to create tension between these two groups.

Both manufacturers and developers want many of the same things – clear standards, secure platforms and a high degree of extensibility – but, because of the nascent state of the market, don’t necessarily know how to cope with the lack of standards or clarity around how to implement effective security controls in such technically constrained environments, or how to manage interoperability. Managing the complexity of communication within heterogeneous IoT environments and vast networks at scale also makes the task of developing robust IoT services which stand up to consumer expectations all the more challenging.

These challenges need to be overcome before that tremendous value of IoT can be realised. This whitepaper, sponsored by Golgi and published by BCN, luckily, looks at how cloud-based services can help bridge the gaps between the requirements of IoT device manufacturers and application developers:

  • Navigating existing IoT standards
  • Managing data security and privacy
  • Dealing with heterogeneous networks
  • The role of cloud services in IoT

Download the whitepaper for free from BCN now…

Google Brillo, Internet of Things, IoT, Opinion, Weave

Google’s IoT land grab: will Brillo help or hinder?

Google's having a go at the Internet of Things, but how will it sit with developers and device manufacturers?

Google’s having a go at the Internet of Things, but how will it sit with developers and device manufacturers?

The long rumoured Project Brillo, Google’s answer to the Internet of Things, was finally unveiled this week at the company’s annual I/O conference, and while the project shows promise it comes at time when device manufacturers and developers are increasingly being forced to choose between IoT ecosystems. Contrary to Google’s stated aims, Brillo could – for the same reason – hinder interoperability and choice in IoT rather than facilitate it.

It’s difficult to see Project Brillo as anything more than it really is – an attempt at grabbing highly sought-after ground in the IoT space. It has two key components. There’s Brillo, which is essentially a mini Android OS (made up of some of the services the fully fledged OS abstracts) which Google claims can run on tiny embeddable IP-connected devices (critically, the company hasn’t revealed what the minimum specs for those devices are); and Weave, a proprietary set of APIs that help developers manage the communications layer linking apps on mobile phones to sensors via the cloud.

Brillo will also come with metrics and crash reporting to help developers test and de-bug their IoT services.

The company claims the Weave programme, which will see manufacturers certify to run Brillo on their embeddable devices in much the same Google works with handset makers to certify Android-based mobile devices, will help drive interoperability and quality – two things IoT desperately needs.

The challenge is it’s not entirely clear how Google’s Brillo will deliver on either front. Full-whack Android is almost a case-in-point in itself. Despite have more than a few years to mature, the Android ecosystem is still plagued by fragmentation, which produces its fair share of headaches for developers. As we recently alluded to in an article about Google trying to tackle this problem, developing for a multitude of platforms running Android can be a nightmare; an app running smoothly on an LG G3 can be prone to crashing on a Xiaomi or Sony device because of architectural or resource constraint differences.

This may be further complicated in the IoT space by the fact that embeddable software is, at least currently, much more difficult to upgrade than Android, likely leading to even more software heterogeneity than one currently finds in the Android ecosystem.

Another thing to consider is that most embeddable IoT devices currently in the market or planned for deployment are so computationally and power-constrained (particularly for industrial applications, which is where most IoT stuff is happening these days) that it’s unclear whether there will be a market for Brillo to tap into anytime soon. This  isn’t really much use for developers – the cohort Google’s trying to go after.

For device manufacturers, the challenge will be whether building to Google’s specs will be worth the added cost of building alongside ARM, Arduino, Intel Edison or other IoT architectures. History would suggest that it’s always cheaper to build to one architecture rather than multiple (which is what’s driving standards development in this nascent space), and while Google tries to ease the pain of dealing with different manufacturers on the developer side by abstracting lower level functions through APIs, it could create a situation where manufacturers will have to choose which ecosystem they play in – leading to more fragmentation and as a result more frustration for developers. For developers, at least those unfamiliar with Android, it comes at the cost of being locked into a slew of proprietary (or at least Google-owned) technologies and APIs rather than open technologies that could – in a truly interoperable way – weave Brillo and non-Brillo devices with cloud services and mobile apps.

Don’t get me wrong – Google’s reasoning is sound. The Internet of Things is the cool new kid on the block with forecast revenues so vast they could make a grown man weep. There are a fleet of developers building apps and services for Android and the company has great relationships with pretty much every silicon manufacturer on the planet. It seems reasonable to believe that the company which best captures the embeddable software space stands a pretty good chance at winning out at other levels of the IoT stack. But IoT craves interoperability and choice (and standards) more than anything, which even in the best of circumstances can create a tenuous relationship between developers and device manufacturers, where their respective needs stand in opposition. Unfortunately, it’s not quite clear whether Brillo or Weave will truly deliver on the needs of either camp.

Avago, Broadcom, Chris Taylor, Hock Tan, Internet of Things, IoT, M&A, News & Analysis, Strategy Analytics

Avago buys Broadcom for $37bn to create IoT chip dream team

Avago is buying Broadcom for $37bn to create an IoT giant

Avago is buying Broadcom for $37bn to create an IoT giant

It seems every corner of the mobile market is consolidating right now and semiconductors are clearly no exception, with digital signal processing chip maker Avago acquiring communications chip company Broadcom for $37bn, reports Telecoms.com.

Avago was spun off from Agilent Technologies back in 2005, which was itself spun off from HP in 1999, leading to what was at the time the world’s largest IPO. It has a broad portfolio of semiconductor products and is strong in mixed-signal circuits and sensors. Broadcom has long been a leader in communications technologies such as ethernet, wifi and Bluetooth.

“Today’s announcement marks the combination of the unparalleled engineering prowess of Broadcom with Avago’s heritage of technology from HP, AT&T, and LSI Logic, in a landmark transaction for the semiconductor industry,” said Hock Tan, president and chief executive of Avago. “The combination of Avago and Broadcom creates a global diversified leader in wired and wireless communication semiconductors. Avago has established a strong track record of successfully integrating companies onto its platform.”

“This transaction benefits all of Broadcom’s key stakeholders,” said Scott McGregor, president and chief executive of Broadcom. “Our customers will gain access to a greater breadth of technology and product capability. For our shareholders, the transaction provides both compelling up-front value as well as the opportunity to participate in the future upside of the combined business.”

In practice the combination of Avago’s strength in sensors and Broadcom’s in communications looks like a potential IoT dream team, creating the ability to offer unified IoT chips that do everything you could ask of a connected thing.

Chris Taylor, analyst at Strategy Analytics, told explained that Avago’s other strengths include RF power amplifiers and filters. “Their most notable success has been in Apple phones over the past several years with their multi-mode, multi-band power amplifiers,” he said. Taylor also noted their success in RF filters for LTE bands above 1.9 GHz, which are likely to be used more extensively as more capacity is needed.

A similar move was recently announced by NXP and Freescale, which are merging to form a semi company with strengths in NFC, automotive and microcontrollers, and which NXP announced today it would be selling off its RF Power business to fund. Both of these merged companies must compete with mobile chip leader Qualcomm, which acquired wifi chip giant Atheros back in 2011. It will be interesting to see if there’s a response to all this M&A from Asian chip players such as Mediatek.

Enterprise IT, IDC, Internet of Things, Interviews, IoT, Phil Carnelley

Phil Carnelley, research director at IDC on cloud, big data, Internet of Things

Philip Carnelley shares his views on the big disrupters in IT

Philip Carnelley shares his views on the big disrupters in IT

As we approach Cloud World Forum in London this June BCN had the opportunity to catch up with one of the conference speakers, Philip Carnelley, software research director at IDC Europe to discuss his views on the most disruptive trends in IT today.

What do you see as the most disruptive trend in enterprise IT today?

This is a tricky one but I think it’s got to be the Internet of Things – extending the edge of the network, we’re expecting a dramatic rise in internet-connected cars, buildings, homes, sensors for health and industrial equipment, wearables and more.

IDC expects some 28 billion IoT devices to be operational by 2020. Amongst other things, this will change the way a lot of companies operate, changing from device providers to service providers, and allowing device manufacturers to directly sell to, and service, their end customers in the way they didn’t before.

What do you think is lacking in the cloud sector today?

There are 2 things. First, many organizations still have concerns about security, privacy and compliance in a cloud-centric world. The industry needs to make sure that organizations understand that these needs can be met by today’s solutions.

Second, while most people buy into the cloud vision, it’s often not easy to get to there from where they are today. The industry must make it easy as possible, with simple solutions that don’t require fleets of highly trained people to understand and implement.

Are you seeing more enterprises look to non-relational database tech for transactional uses?

Absolutely. We’re seeing a definite rise in the use of NoSQL databases, as IT and DB architects become much more ready to choose databases on a use-base basis rather than just going for the default choice. A good example is the use of Basho Riak at the National Health Service.

Is cloud changing the way mobile apps and services are developed in enterprises?

Yes, there is a change towards creating mobile apps and services that draw on ‘mobile back-end-as-a-service’ technologies for their creation and operation

Why do you think it’s important to attend Cloud World Forum?

Because cloud is the fundamental platform for what IDC calls the 3rd Platform of Computing. We are in the middle of a complete paradigm shift to cloud-centric computing – with the associated technologies of mobile, social and big data – which is driving profound changes in business processes and even business models (think Uber, AirBnB, Netflix). Any company that wants to remain competitive in this new era needs to embrace these technologies, to learn more about them, in the way it develops and runs its operations for B2E, B2B and B2C processes.

Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Samsung

Samsung announces open Internet of Things platform

Samsung have launched an IoT platform

Samsung have launched an IoT platform

Samsung has announced the launch of a platform for the Internet of Things, “ARTIK”, which it claims is completely open and serves the entire software and hardware requirements of IoT.

Samsung Electronics’ president and chief strategy officer, Young Sohn, described ARTIK as “the industry’s most advanced, open and secure platform for developing IoT products.” Samsung claims it will enable developers to customise and deploy IoT-devices, as well as the services they deliver.

From a hardware perspective, ARTIK comes in three flavours, imaginatively titled ARTIK 1, 5 and 10 respectively. ARTIK 1 is the 144mm2 embedded module designed for small form-factor IoT applications and utilises Bluetooth/BLE technology for low-powered short range communications. ARTIK 5, Samsung says, is intended for small-to-medium size devices, such as home hubs and drones, and comes with a 1GHz dual-core processor, flash memory and on-board DRAM.

ARTIK 10 meanwhile is the full-fat module with an eight-core processor, HD video encoding/processing, 2GB DRAM and 16GB flash, and a variety of short-range, low power communications tech inside, such as wifi, Bluetooth, ZigBee. Samsung reckons it’s ideal for media applications, Industrial IoT and home servers.

“Industry requirements for IoT devices vary in terms of battery life, computational horse power and form factor,” said Sohn. “With this family of ARTIK offerings, Samsung is directly addressing the needs of the widest range of customers, uses and applications. ARTIK allows developers to rapidly turn great ideas into market leading IoT products and applications.”

ARTIK also incorporates a number of software considerations to give it credibility as a holistic IoT platform, according to Samsung. Technical aspects of the platform include security and privacy, local storage and computational capabilities, low-power architecture, small form factor, and compatility with the major connectivity protocols. Finally, the platform comes with a software stack which is intended to allow developers to go directly with application framework, thus removing the need to build low-level software

Ardruino, Brian Kelly, Golgi, Intel Edison, Internet of Things, IoT, News & Analysis, Openmind Networks

Golgi adds native Arduino, Intel Edison support to IoT platform

Golgi is adding support for more devices to its Internet of Things cloud service

Golgi is adding support for more devices to its Internet of Things cloud service

Data transport and Internet of Things cloud service provider Golgi has added support for native Arduino and Intel Edison endpoints in a bid to bolster the IoT platform.

Golgi, which is owned by data transport tech provider Openmind Networks, offers a cloud-based managed connectivity service that helps bridge the gap between different IoT devices and applications across multi-architecture networks.

The service effectively auto-generates native code for each endpoint once the platform is told what kind of data it will be ingesting from them, so that developers don’t have to muck about learning a rift of different technologies in order to link up a broad range of sensors to their applications and services.

“Our support for Arduino and Edison creates a place where IoT developers and makers of embedded devices can meet,” said Brian Kelly, chief technology officer and co-founder of Golgi.

One of the big challenges in the IoT sector at the moment sits where the needs of device manufacturers and IoT app developers conflict.

Device manufacturers seem incentivised to back (build to) as few technology ecosystems as possible given the cost implications, but as we’re still in the heyday of IoT it is clear there is no shortage of IoT tech ecosystems, each with their own take on transport and application language support, jockeying for the top spot. Similarly, developers don’t want to have to learn a raft of technologies just to develop and deploy an IoT service. That’s the challenge Golgi is trying to solve – by abstracting much of the underlying coding work away.

“We’ve been solving operators’ data transport problems for 13 years, and now we’ve extended our infrastructure to solve these problems for IoT developers. Because Golgi translates the various communications languages of device makers, developers don’t have to learn them; they can focus on what they know best. As a result, their product development cycle is shortened by 50 per cent and time to market is speeded up,” Kelly said.

agriculture, Analytics, Azure, Fujitsu, Internet of Things, IoT, Microsoft, News & Analysis, Vendor, Windows

Fujitsu, Microsoft collaborate on Azure, Internet of Things

Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure

Fujitsu and Microsoft are partnering on IoT for farming and agricutlure

Fujitsu and Microsoft announced an Internet of Things partnership focused on blending the former’s devices and IoT services for agriculture and manufacturing, powered by Windows software and Azure cloud services.

The move will see the two companies offer a solution that blends Fujitsu’s Eco-Management Dashboard, an IoT service for the agricultural sector, and Microsoft’s Azure database services so that data collected from sensors deployed throughout the operations can be analysed to help firms save money and streamline processes.

The companies said the platform has uses in other sectors and can be tailored to a range of different niche verticals.

“Leveraging the Fujitsu Eco-Management Dashboard solution alongside Microsoft Azure and the Fujitsu IoT/M2M platform, we are able to deliver real-time visualisation of the engineering process for big data analytics to improve the entire production process and inform decision-making,” said Hiroyuki Sakai, corporate executive officer, executive vice president, head of global marketing at Fujitsu.

“We are proud to partner with Fujitsu to enable the next generation of manufacturing business models and services enabled by IoT along with advanced analytics capabilities like machine learning,” said Sanjay Ravi, managing director, Discrete Manufacturing Industry at Microsoft. “Fujitsu’s innovation will drive new levels of operational excellence and accelerate the pace of digital business transformation in manufacturing.”

Fujitsu has been doubling down on IoT this year, with manufacturing looking to be a strong sector for those kinds of services according to anlaysts. In January the company announced plans to expand its two core datacentres in Japan in a bid to accelerate demand for its cloud and IoT services.

The 2nd annual Internet of Things World event to be held in San Francisco in May is due to address some of the challenges ahead of the industry in terms of IoT. Sign up here.

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