Category Archives: IoT

Intel prioritizes cloud, IoT and 5G in new business strategy

IntelIntel has outlined a new business strategy to capitalize on new trends within the industry including cloud technology, IoT and 5G.

Speaking on the company’s blog, CEO Brian Krzanich outlined the organizations new strategy which is split into five sections; cloud technology, IoT, memory and programmable solutions, 5G and developing new technologies under the concept of Moore’s law.

“Our strategy itself is about transforming Intel from a PC company to a company that powers the cloud and billions of smart, connected computing devices,” said Krzanich. “But what does that future look like? I want to outline how I see the future unfolding and how Intel will continue to lead and win as we power the next generation of technologies.

“There is a clear virtuous cycle here – the cloud and data centre, the Internet of Things, memory and FPGA’s are all bound together by connectivity and enhanced by the economics of Moore’s Law. This virtuous cycle fuels our business, and we are aligning every segment of our business to it.”

Krzanich believes virtualization and software trends, which are apparently redefining the concept of the data centre, aligns well with the Intel business model and future proposition, through the company’s position in the high-performance computing food chain. Through continued investment in analytics, big data and machine learning technologies, the company aims to drive more of the footprint of the data centre to Intel architecture.

The company’s play for the potentially lucrative IoT market will be built on the phrase of ‘connected to the cloud’. Intel has highlighted it will focus on autonomous vehicles, industrial and retail as our primary growth drivers of the Internet of Things, combining its capabilities within the cloud ecosystem to drive growth within IoT.

While were a number of buzzwords and trends highlighted throughout Krzanich’s post, Moore’s Law appeared to receive particular attention. While generally considered a plausible theory, Moore’s Law itself would appear to be underplayed within the industry, a point which Krzanich did not seem to agree with.

“In my 34 years in the semiconductor industry, I have witnessed the advertised death of Moore’s Law no less than four times,” said Krzanich. “As we progress from fourteen nanometer technology to ten nanometer and plan for seven nanometer and five nanometer and even beyond, our plans are proof that Moore’s Law is alive and well. Intel’s industry leadership of Moore’s Law remains intact, and you will see continued investment in capacity and R&D to ensure so.”

Krzanich’s comments provide more clarity to last week’s announcement on how it would be restructuring the business to accelerate its transformation project, and also it quarterly earnings. The data centre and Internet of Things (IoT) businesses would appear to be Intel’s primary growth engines, delivering $2.2 billion in revenue growth last year, and accounting for roughly 40% of revenue across the period.

The transformation project itself is part of a long-term ambition of the business, as it aims to move the perception of the company away from client computing (PCs and mobile devices) and towards IoT and the cloud. The announcements over the last week have had mixed results in the market; following its quarterlies share price rose slightly, though has declined over the subsequent days.

Microsoft and Rolls Royce collaborate to build next-gen intelligent engines

Rolls RoyceMicrosoft and Rolls Royce have announced a new collaboration to bring the next generation of intelligent engines to the aviation industry.

Rolls-Royce will integrate Microsoft Azure IoT Suite and Cortana Intelligence Suite into its service solutions to expand its digital capabilities, particularly around its Totalcare service offering, which aims to improve the lifespan of its assets for customers. The partnership builds on underlying trends within the industrial and manufacturing industry in moving from a reactive to proactive maintenance and repair model, using IoT to detect faults in real-time, but also identifying the tell-tale signs of such faults at industrial scale, prior to them becoming a problem.

“Our customers are looking for ways to leverage the digital landscape to increase efficiency and improve their operations,” said Tom Palmer, SVP of Services and Civil Aerospace at Rolls-Royce. “By working with Microsoft we can really transform our digital services, supporting customer’s right across engine-related aircraft operations to make a real difference to performance.”

At the Hannover Messe event in Germany, both Microsoft and Rolls Royce will demonstrate the new capabilities, including using the Azure IoT Suite to collect and aggregate data from disparate, geographically distributed sources and Cortana Intelligence Suite to analyse the data itself. Data sets will include engine health data, air traffic control information, route restrictions and fuel usage data, with the aim of increasing the assets fuel efficiency, as well as detecting anomalies and ongoing trends.

“Rolls-Royce has always been a pioneer in engine services, and this collaboration will create a new digital engine for Rolls-Royce to deliver an even better service to its customers across its world-class engine fleet through Microsoft Azure,” said Jason Zander, Corporate VP of Azure at Microsoft.

Microsoft also announced at the event it has been working with the OPC Foundation to ensure industry IoT scenarios is compliant within OPC Unified Architecture (UA) standard. The OPC UA provides a standardized communication, security, and metadata and semantics abstraction for the majority of industrial equipment, ensuring interoperability between devices, assets and the platform to interpret the collected data.

Microsoft’s support for the standard covers its entire IoT portfolio including local connectivity with Windows devices to cloud connectivity via the Microsoft Azure platform. The announcement also included extended support for OPC UA open source software stack, ensuring any Windows 10 devices running the Universal Windows Platform can connect and openly communicate with other IoT devices via OPC UA.

“As Industry 4.0 reaches a tipping point, we believe that openness and interoperability between hardware, software and services will help manufacturers transform how they operate and create solutions that benefit employees’ productivity,” said Sam George, Director of Azure Internet of Things at Microsoft. “Microsoft’s support of OPC UA in Azure IoT and Windows IoT will reduce barriers to industrial IoT adoption and help deliver immediate value.”

What did we learn from Verizon’s IoT report?

Iot isometric flowchart design bannerVerizon has recently released its State of the Market: Internet of Things 2016 report, which outlined the growth and potential for the IoT industry. The report features a number of use cases and information detailing the technology’s rise to fame, but also barriers for enterprise organizations over the coming months.

Here, we’ve detailed a few of the lessons learnt from the report:

IoT is no longer a nice idea, it’s becoming mainstream

If 2015 was the year IoT gained credibility in the business world, 2016 is the year IoT gains commercial feasibility.

While the concept of IoT has been around for some time, the idea of the technology having a B2B commercial backbone, capable of delivering on commercial objectives is now a reality. The potential of IoT has been well discussed but now we are seeing companies delivering on the promise. IBM is one which has particularly active in this segment, driving the Watson use case through the press repeatedly this year.

Wearables had a head start on B2B applications, though could be to thank for the relative ease of acceptance within the industry (both for enterprise and consumers). The marketing campaigns surrounding the earliest fitness wearables or smart watches normalized IoT, allowing for what could be perceived as a simple transition into the B2B sphere. But thanks to these (comparative) simple applications, the integration of IoT into the manufacturing process, healthcare, transportation, utilities, smart cities and any other context you could think of, has been a seemingly simple transition.

According to Verizon’s research, IoT networks connections have been growing healthily, the number of connections in the utilities industry has grown 58% between 2014 and 2015, and this is also backed up by forecasts by IDC research. The IDC’s findings estimate the IoT market spend will increase from $591.7 billion in 2014 to $1.3 trillion in 2019.

IoT might be entering mainstream, but data could hold it back

Data acquisition, analysis and action might be becoming one of the most repetitive conversations in the industry, but that is for good reason.

Verizon captureVerizon recently commissioned a report by Oxford Economics highlighted only 8% of businesses are using more than 25% of the IoT data which they have collected. In fact, only 50% of the businesses involved in the study said they would be using more than 25% of the collected IoT data in three years’ time.

On the surface, this shouldn’t seem as an issue that would cause too many problems, until you take into account the long-term deliverables of IoT. The promise of IoT is the collection of vast quantities of data to allow advanced analytics tools to make accurate predictions and customizations. If only a partial amount of the data is being analysed, only a partial amount of the promise can be realized.

IoT has hit the mainstream market, however it will never reach the promised deliverables if companies are not analysing more of the data collected. What is the point is spending millions on sensors, connections, storage and data scientists, if the full potential of the technology cannot be achieved. Can the long term financial security of the IoT industry be guaranteed if the promise is never fully realized?

There could be a number of reasons for the backlog of data, though industry insiders have told BCN the interface required to translate different data sets into a common language for analysis could be one of the reasons for the holdup. It would appear not all of the IoT value chain has evolved at the same pace.

Regulators will have to play a more significant role in the future

Regulation does and will play a major role in the delivery and adoption of IoT. Back in 2007 the Energy Act in the US accelerated the role of IoT in the monitoring of energy consumption, and while this could be considered the initial catalyst, growth has increased year on year ever since.

Verizon capture 2While this is an instance of regulation giving the IoT industry freedom to grow, it should not be seen as a surprise if regulators put in place rulings which could limit what the industry can and cannot do. Whether it is the ethical use of data, volumes of data which can be collected on a single person or the means in which and where the data is stored, regulation is likely to play a more significant role in coming years.

The report discusses the security of IoT which is a constant barrier for businesses and individuals alike. New regulations are likely to severely punish instances of data loss, and when you consider the sheer volume of data should IoT reach its potential, future instances of data loss could be disastrous.

Currently regulation within the IoT market is relatively low-key, encouraging growth of the technology as opposed to monitoring it, however there are a number of areas which need consideration in the short- to mid-term future. Lack of control and information asymmetry, low-quality consent, intrusive identification of behaviour patterns and user profiling and limitations on the possibility of remaining anonymous whilst using services are all areas which should be taken into consideration.

Microsoft steps up IoT credentials

Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft

Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft

Tech giant Microsoft has launched a number of updates and features for both its Azure and Office platforms, in a move to bolster its position in the intelligent apps and IoT space.

Speaking at Build 2016, the company launched the general availability of Azure Service Fabric and new IoT starter kits, as well as previews of new services to serverless compute for event-driven solutions, Azure Functions, and Power BI Embedded, which allows developers to embed reports and visualizations in any application.

“Microsoft is the only cloud vendor that supports the diverse needs of every organization and developer — from core infrastructure services to platform services and tools to software-as-a-service — for any language, across any platform,” said Scott Guthrie, EVP of the Cloud and Enterprise Group at Microsoft.

“With 30 regions worldwide — more than every major cloud provider combined — Azure’s massive scale means developers and businesses alike can focus on creating the next generation of amazing applications, not their underlying cloud infrastructure. This makes our cloud the de facto choice for enterprises of today and tomorrow — and today, more than 85 percent of the Fortune 500 agree.”

The launch of Azure Service Fabric will allow developers to decompose applications into microservices, for increased availability and scalability. The company claims the offering will handle application lifecycle management for constant uptime and easy application scaling, and builds on the growing popularity of microservices in the industry and is accompanied by the promise of open-source programming frameworks for Linux later in the year. As with a number of Microsoft’s announcements over recent weeks, open-source has been a prominent product position for the company at Build 2016.

The company also highlighted its IoT starter kit would be available for anyone with Windows or Linux experience to build prototypes which use all of Azure’s offerings. Prices for the kit range between $60 and $150, which could potentially open up a new market of students, academics and casual users for the company.

For the more complex IoT projects, the company have also previewed Azure Functions which will enable developers to create apps which will automatically respond to events in virtually any Azure or 3rd party service as well as on-premises systems. The preview is part of the greater trend of automated responses and reactions to events, and appears to be Microsoft’s response to AWS Lambda, which was launched in late 2014.

Qi Lu

Qi Lu, EVP of the Applications and Services Group at Microsoft

Outside of the Azure platform, the company also announced a number of product updates and features for Office. “In terms of reach, Office is one of the few platforms in the world that provides developers with access to over a billion users across a variety of devices,” said Qi Lu, EVP of the Applications and Services Group. “The opportunity to build on the Office platform has never been greater.”

“With new extensions and new connections to the Microsoft Graph — an intelligent fabric that applies machine learning to map the connections between people, content and interactions across Office 365 — developers are empowered to build intelligent apps that can transform the landscape of work,” said Lu.

Alongside Lu, Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger showcased how he has been using the platform to create an add-on which enables customers to send a gift-card through Outlook, and also schedule meetings at the nearest Starbucks. “Building on the Office platform is reaching our customers right on their desktop or device and extending the Starbucks Experience to them in new and compelling ways,” he said.

As part of the announcement, Microsoft previewed six new APIs for the Microsoft Graph which let developers link Office 365 data to third-party solutions. One of which automatically identifies a series of times a predefined group of people are available for a meeting.

Apple enters consumer e-health market

Apple carekitApple has announced the launch of CareKit, an open-source software framework which enables its consumers and doctors to proactively keep track of their health through monitoring symptoms and medications in real-time.

The open-source framework follows the launch of ResearchKit last year and enables consumers to us data collected from various sources to understand their health. The app also enables consumers to record feedback on how well they are feeling or recovering from a procedure which can be shared with family members and their doctor remotely.

“We’re thrilled with the profound impact ResearchKit has already had on the pace and scale of conducting medical research, and have realised that many of the same principles could help with individual care,” said Jeff Williams, Apple’s COO. “We believe that giving individuals the tools to understand what is happening with their health is incredibly powerful, and apps designed using CareKit make this a reality by empowering people to take a more active role in their care.”

From next month, the developer community will be able to build their own apps through the open-source software, however Apple have designed four modules in the first instance. Care Card is a to-do list reminding consumers to take medication or perform certain exercises, which can be tracked through various Apple devices. The Symptoms and Measurement Tracker enables consumers to record their symptoms and progress. The Insight Dashboard compares the symptoms to the data taken from the Care Card to ensure that treatment is effective, and the Connect module shares all information with the person’s doctor.

The concept of CareKit is one of the few data analytics use cases available to the consumer market, though the open-source framework will offer opportunities for developers. While the framework is not available for the wider community currently, Apple has been working with a number of developers to demonstrate the use case of the framework. One example, Glow Nature, is an app incorporating the CareKit modules to offer advice to women to guide them through a healthier pregnancy.

The launch of CareKit follows healthy adoption of ResearchKit, a similar open-source framework designed for medical researchers. ResearchKit enables doctors, scientists and other researchers to gather data from participants anywhere in the world using iPhone apps. While ResearchKit enables researchers to more accurately gather data and further their research, CareKit provides these organizations an alternative means to communicate with the mass audience.

“With ResearchKit, we quickly realised the power of mobile apps for running inexpensive, high-quality clinical studies with unprecedented reach,” said Ray Dorsey, Professor of Neurology at the University of Rochester Medical Centre. “We hope that CareKit will help us close the gap between our research findings and how we care for our Parkinson’s patients day-to-day. It’s opening up a whole new opportunity for the democratisation of research and medicine.”

Hybrid environments and IoT pose biggest threats to infosec – F5

F5 Forum 2Service providers and enterprises face an insecure networking environment in coming years as more applications, data and services are sent to the cloud, according to networking vendor F5, writes Telecoms.com.

Speaking at the F5 Forum in London, VP of UK and Ireland Keith Bird stressed security is now front and centre not only to the CTO and CEO, but to consumers as intrusion or security breaches regularly make headlines. Bird pointed to the hybrid on-premise/cloud-based environment, in which an increasing number of enterprise and service providers operate, as a huge challenge looming for the information security industry.

“Not so long ago, we looked at just single points of entry. In today’s hybrid world, we’ve got apps in the data centre or in the cloud as SaaS and this is only increasing,” he said. “What we know for sure is that there is no longer a perimeter to the network – that’s totally disappeared.”

“81% of people we recently surveyed said they plan on operating in a hybrid environment, while 20% said they’re now moving over half of their corporate applications to the cloud. Even some of the largest companies in the world are taking up to 90% of their applications to the cloud.”

Given the volume and nature of data being hosted in the cloud, firms are far more accountable and held to tighter information security standards today than they have ever been. The average financial impact of an information security breach is now in the region of $7.2 million, according to F5 research.

“The average cost of a security breach consists of $110,000 lost revenue per hour of downtime – but the effect on a company’s website or application is costing potential business,” said Bird. “The average customer will abandon an attempted session after roughly four seconds of inactivity, so there’s new business being lost as well.”

F5 said of the threats it is seeing at the moment, according to customer surveys, the evolving nature and sophistication of attacks ranks highest, with the internal threat of employee ignorance a close second.

“So what are the top security challenges our customers are seeing?” said Bird. “58% are seeing increasingly sophisticated attacks on their networks, from zero-day to zero-second. 52% were concerned that their own employees don’t realise the impact of not following security policies. Obviously plenty of people said they don’t have enough budget, but that’s not quite the biggest problem facing security departments today.”

F5’s Technical Director Gary Newe, who’s responsible for field systems engineering, said the looming prospect of IoT “scares the bejesus” out of him.

“We’ve all heard about the IoT,” he said before pointing to the connected fridge as a farcically insecure IoT device. “There are 3 billion devices which run Java, which makes it 3 million hackable devices, and that scares the bejesus out of me. This isn’t just a potential impact to the enterprise, but it could have a massive impact on consumers and families. Fitness trackers, for example, just encourage people to give a tonne of data over to companies we don’t know about, and we don’t know how good their security is.”

The scariest bit, Newe emphasised, is the growing knowledge and intelligence of more technically adept youngsters today, and how the rate of technological change will only exacerbate the requirement for a fresh approach to network security.

“Change is coming at a pace, the likes of which we’ve never seen nor ever anticipated,” he said. “We’re building big walls around our networks, but hackers are just walking through the legitimate front doors we’re putting in instead.

“The scariest thing is that the OECD [Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development] has said the average IQ today is 10 points higher than it was 20 years ago. So teenagers today are smarter than we ever were, they’ve got more compute power than we ever had, and they’re bored. That, to me, is terrifying.”

IBM, Apple combine IoT forces for sleep health study

electronic medical health recordIBM’s Watson Cloud is to be the foundation for research by the American Sleep Apnea Association (ASAA) into how human sleeping habits affect our health. IBM and ASAA have also jointly created a new SleepHealth app to encourage patients to contribute to the cloud based SleepHealth Mobile Study.

The SleepHealth study uses Apple’s Internet of Things technology and open source ResearchKit, which simplifies tasks and survey compilation and feeds its data into the SleepHealth app. SleepHealth is the first ResearchKit study to run on the Watson Health Cloud.

Though sleep is critical for physical and metal health it remains one of the most overlooked of the basic human needs and one in four Americans experience sleep problems. Chronic insomnia affects 10% of Americans and 25 million suffer from types of obstructive sleep apnoea such as disrupted sleep, snoring and uneven breathing, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This in turn can create heart disease, hypertension, obesity, cancer, depression and fatal accidents.

Researchers and physicians will use Watson to host its surveys and study exercises and interrogate the data to uncover patterns. The Watson Cloud makes crowd-sourcing data possible and creates a system of patient-led research and data-driven discovery, according ASAAs chief science officer Carl Stepnowsky. The SleepHealth app could build the world’s largest longitudinal study to collect data on both healthy and unhealthy sleepers, said Stepnowsky.

The Watson Health Cloud has opened up a diversity of data sources such as medical literature, treatment guidelines, claims data and clinical data, according to Kyu Rhee, chief health officer for Watson Health. Researchers can also opt to apply Watson Analytics for deeper insights from the data. “One of our goals at IBM Watson Health is to eliminate silos that hinder collaboration between researchers, patients and clinicians,” said Rhee.

The study also makes use of IoT technology. The SleepHealth app makes use of multiple Apple Watch sensors, such as the accelerometer, which detects movements, and the gyroscope, which determines orientation in space, to measure and record movements such as shifting positions during sleep. It also uses Apple Watch’s heart rate monitor to detect sleep. Some of the app’s features, such as the Personal Sleep Concierge and the Nap Tracker, were designed specifically to the Apple Watch as a way to improve sleep habits. SleepHealth will be the first ResearchKit app to use Apple’s new Night Shift feature that reduces light exposure before sleep.

HCL and Microsoft launch IoT incubation centre

IoT cloud iconIndia based global services company HCL Technologies has launched an Internet of Things (IoT) incubation centre in Redmond, the home of Microsoft.

The two vendors will use the Microsoft Azure IoT Suite to create apps for industry and manufacturing and the Life Sciences and Healthcare sector. According to HCL these are the two key high growth vertical markets in which demand for IoT apps will be strongest.

The top three use cases named by HCL will be in industrial automation, remote patient monitoring and fleet management, but there will be a variety of other apps under development. The centre will develop new methods of using real-time analytics, sensory data and rapid co-creation, says HCL.

The Incubation Centre will aim to combine HCL’s skills in engineering and product lifecycle management, systems integration and infrastructure services with Microsoft’s leadership in IoT, it said.

IoT WoRKS by HCL promises to get more performance out of any company’s existing asset investment and create new services with measurable business outcomes. HCL’s offering has three phases, Define, Build and Run, to help design enterprise IoT programmes, develop IoT systems and manage the uptime of enterprise systems respectively.

“Industrial IoT is the next big productivity and revenue generation lever for enterprises worldwide,” said Sukamal Banerjee, EVP & Head of IoT WoRKS’s Business Unit at HCL Technologies.

Last week BCN reported that Microsoft has put its new Azure IoT hub on general availability. It claims the new system will be a simple bridge between its customers’ devices with their systems in the cloud. The new preconfigured IoT offering, when used with the Azure IoT Suite, can be used to create a machine to machine network and a storage system for its data in minutes, it claims.

Microsoft creates Azure hub for Internet of Things

azure iotMicrosoft has put its new Azure IoT hub on general availability. In a statement, it claims the new system will be a simple bridge between its customers’ devices with their systems in the cloud. It claims that the new preconfigured IoT offering, when used with the Azure IoT Suite, can be used to create a machine to machine network and a storage system for its data in minutes.

The new Azure IoT Hub promises ‘secure, reliable two-way communication from device to cloud and cloud to device’. It uses the open protocols widely adopted in machine to machine technology, such as MQTT, HTTPS and AMQPS. Microsoft claims the IoT Hub will easily integrate with other Azure services like Azure Machine Learning and Azure Stream Analytics. The Machine Learning service uses algorithms in an attempt to spot patterns (such as unusual activity, hacking attempts or commercial trends) that might be useful to data scientists. Azure Stream Analytics allows data scientists and decision makers to act on those insights in real time, through a system with the capacity to simultaneously monitor millions of devices and take automatic action.

Microsoft launched the Azure IoT Suite in September 2015 with a pledge to guarantee standards through its Certified for IoT programme, promising to verify partners that work with operating systems such as Linux, mbed, RTOS and Windows. Microsoft claims its initial backers were Arduino, Beagleboard, Freescale, Intel, Raspberry Pi, Samsung and Texas Instruments. In the three months since the IoT Suite’s launch it has added ‘nearly 30’ more partners, it claims, notably Advantech, Dell, HPE, and Libelium.

“IoT is poised for dramatic growth in 2016 and we can’t wait to see what our customers and partners will continue to build on our offerings. We’re just getting started,” wrote blog author Sam George, Microsoft’s partner director for Azure IoT.

Wind River and IBM to integrate their IoT clouds

IoT cloud iconIntel’s IoT software subsidiary Wind River is to work with IBM to make Industrial IoT projects run smoother and more efficiently. The two companies will work together on a series of initiatives aimed at clarifying their processes for each other, offering guidance to third parties and simplifying the task of integrating their respective systems with each other.

A published series of instructions, which IBM describes as ‘edge to cloud recipes’ aims to guide customers on how to integrate services from the IBM Watson IoT Cloud Platform with products from the Wind River Helix portfolio.

Any customers who use the recipes could, in theory, connect industrial devices running Wind River software to the IBM Watson IoT Cloud Platform and get access to IBM Bluemix cloud services and analytics. This, says Wind River, will help IoT developers develop smart connected devices more easily by cutting the time they’ll spend searching for relevant information and variables.

The IBM and Wind River ‘recipes’ and reference material will also help users with tasks such as device management and help users to apply IBM’s machine learning to the IoT. Other guidance that Wind River intends to offer clients and partners includes help on managing devices and systems in different vertical markets. Among the specialities on which guidance is available are smart buildings, transport, factory automation and the health sector.

Under the arrangement Wind River and IBM will provide elements that can be combined for a complete ‘edge-to-cloud’ IoT solution (a system connecting remote peripherals to the cloud). Detail is available on a range of Wind River operating systems, including VxWorks, Rocket and Pulsar Linux and Helix Cloud (Wind River’s family of software as a service offerings). Instructions are available on how to integrate each of these, in turn, with a range of IBM systems including IBM Watson IoT Cloud Platform, IBM Bluemix, and IBM IoT Real-Time Insights for processing device data.