IBM Partners with ARM to Drive IoT Solutions

Looking to make it simpler to build Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, IBM (IBM) and ARM (ARMH) today revealed a broad-ranging alliance designed to make it simple to integrate IoT endpoints and gateways with back-end analytics software from IBM.

Under the terms of the agreement, the two companies will provide access to software development kits (SDKs) that make it simpler to invoke application programming interfaces (APIs) to build IoT applications, said Chris O’Conner, general manager of the IoT business unit at IBM. In the case of IBM, those APIs will connect back to IBM IoT Foundation, a cloud service managed by IBM based on the IBM Bluemix platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment running on the IBM SoftLayer Cloud.

Krisztian Flautner, general manager for the IoT Business at ARM, added that the end goal is to provide seamless connectivity between devices built using low-cost ARM processors and back-end IBM services such as analytics applications.

O’Connor said IBM is making a concerted effort to reduce the barrier to entry when it comes to building IoT solutions. By combining access to back-end services via open APIs with ubiquitous connectivity over the Internet, just about any organization can now build an IoT application, he noted.

In fact, he added, there is a growing massive realization among business executives regarding the potential impact of IoT. As a result, IBM is seeing a massive spike in interest in IoT solutions. For that reason, IBM today also announced it has collaborated with ARM to create IoT for Electronics, which is an instance of IBM IoT Foundation aimed specifically at the electronics industry.

While the concept of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications has been around for a while, Flautner noted that IoT applies those concepts at much grander scale. Instead of having to form contracts that detail much of the underlying infrastructure that will be used to drive a project, IoT essentially assumes the underlying network layer is already in place.

The issue facing solution providers that want to participate in the IoT space then becomes deciding to what degree will they need to build those solutions from the ground up. In many instances it will be simpler and more cost-effective to leverage back-end services managed by a cloud service provider such as IBM.

While it’s still early days as far as deploying IoT solutions in production environments, the land grab for surrounding the winning of contracts for the IoT solutions is already well underway.