In another bold step to strengthen its grip in Europe, Amazon launched a €10 billion investment plan for Germany, with the goal of driving innovation and creating thousands of jobs across the country. This huge financial commitment demonstrates Amazon’s commitment to improving its logistics network, cloud infrastructure, and research and development (R&D) skills in its… Read more »
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US IT giant IBM has made a major statement of intent towards IoT by opening a global HQ dedicated to its Watson Internet of Things offering in Germany, reports Telecoms.com.
Watson is IBM’s cognitive computing unit, designed to use machine learning and natural language processing to analyse unstructured data. At the core of IoT will be the ability to collect vast amounts of data from billions of different sources and make sense of it. IBM is betting that positioning itself as one of the companies best able to help with that process is the way forward.
The Watson IoT HQ in Munich (pictured) will apparently employ 1,000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers all exploring at the intersection of cognitive computing and IoT. IBM sees Europe as the hub of global IoT development and this HQ is its most extensive European investment in over 20 years.
“The Internet of Things will soon be the largest single source of data on the planet, yet almost 90 percent of that data is never acted upon,” said Harriet Green, GM of Watson IoT and Education. “With its unique abilities to sense, reason and learn, Watson opens the door for enterprises, governments and individuals to finally harness this real-time data, compare it with historical data sets and deep reservoirs of accumulated knowledge, and then find unexpected correlations that generate new insights to benefit business and society alike.”
One early Watson IoT partner is the smart building arm of Siemens. “By bringing asset management and analytics together with a deep technical understanding of how buildings perform, Siemens will make customers’ building operations more reliable, cost-optimized and sustainable,” said Matthias Rebellius, CEO of Siemens Building Technologies. “We are excited to stretch the envelope of what is possible in optimizing building performance by combining the asset management and database technologies from IBM’s Watson IoT business unit with our market leading building automation domain know-how.”
IoT is perhaps the defining technological trend for the next decade, encompassing every part of the ICT spectrum. IBM is right to say that all these embedded sensors and smart devices are pointless unless we use all the data they will generate to make useful decisions. In many ways this is the natural evolution of Big Data and it will be no less challenging to demonstrate ROI on IoT.
DigitalOcean is among a number of US-based incumbents moving into Germany
In a bid to tap further into the European market DigitalOcean has expanded its presence in Germany with a new datacentre in Frankfurt.
The dev-focused cloud provider already has a presence in Amsterdam and last year partnered with Equinix to make its cloud platform available in one of the company’s London-based Tier III datacentres.
“We’re here to give our full support to developers throughout the world by offering a simple, ideal cloud solution and infrastructure experience for hosting applications,” said DigitalOcean co-founder and chief exec Ben Uretsky. “Innovative companies in Germany deserve the best tools possible in order to continue to grow and succeed.”
The company also said it wanted to appeal to local companies with strong data residency requirements, a common theme among cloud providers throwing their weight into the German market.
Germany – particularly Berlin – has a big startup scene, but putting the datacentre in Frankfurt means it can benefit from being close to a number of large fibre interconnections. Other US-based incumbents to move into Frankfurt over the past few months include IBM (which also partners with Equinix) and AWS.
The facility is DigitalOcean’s third datacentre in Europe and tenth globally.
Magine, the Swedish cloud-based cable operator, today announced that it has closed a $19 million Series A round led be a group of Swedish and international investors.
The company says that it will use this new influx of cash to fund its international expansion, with Germany and Spain being the next countries on its radar. The service is already available in Sweden.
“Magine is not just another TV platform, but a totally new way of accessing and consuming content,” said Magine chairman Michael Werner. “It is a subscription service that was devised to make viewers come back to watching TV and this is why broadcasters and content providers are very keen to adopt the service. Magine helps them create new forms of monetizing whilst respecting the current rights chain.”
