IBM brings ARM to its Internet of Things platform

The services will enable electronics manufacturers to gather data from individual sensors that can be combined with other data for real time analysis.

Called the IBM IoT Foundation, the data analytics platform will use devices enabled with ARM’s mbed chip – ranging from weather sensors, to wearables – and crunch the numbers for industrial applications.

The IBM IoT Foundation platform offers dozens of tools for data to be managed and analyzed, plus security systems to protect against unauthorized intrusions, and access to the IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service to handle data flow. ARM is already a huge player in the IoT, now licensing around one billion chips per quarter for connected devices with its mbed project, it told Fast Company. The IoT connection also enables delivery of actionable events to control equipment or provide users with alerts or other information.

For those who came in late, IBM has an IoT Foundation cloud platform.

“The IoT is now at an inflection point and it needs the big data expertise of IBM and little data expertise of ARM to ensure it reaches its global potential”, added IBM IoT general manager Pat Toole. “Deploying IoT technology has to be easy, secure and scalable for it to feel like a natural extension of a company’s business”, said Flautner.

IBM describes the IoT Foundation as “a platform upon which a family of fully managed, cloud-hosted offerings” can sit, which “makes it simple to derive value from Internet of Things (IoT) devices”.

If an alarm message is triggered on a machine in a manufacturing plant, it can now be automatically shut down and an engineer despatched to trouble shoot the disruption, IBM said. Clients should be able to enhance engagement, speed up innovation, and improve operations via connected devices thanks to the integration of the two company’s technologies.

IBM has also unveiled a new IoT for electronics that focuses on industry-specific IoT products.

“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.

It claims to provide chips to 75 percent of all 32-bit embedded CPUs, which means three out of every four mobile phones worldwide contain an ARM chip, including those manufactured by Apple, HTC, Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Samsung.