IBM Brings the Internet of Things to the Enterprise

31 Mar 2015: IBM today announced that it will invest $3 billion over the next four years to establish a new Internet of Things (IoT) unit, and that it is building a cloud-based open platform designed to help clients and ecosystem partners build IoT solutions.

IBM’s pioneering work in Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities was based on practical applications of IoT in the enterprise and led to a broad set of solutions, ranging from water management to optimizing retail and customer loyalty to alleviating traffic congestion. IBM leads in enterprise IoT implementations that securely combine and analyze data from a wide variety of sources.

With new industry-specific cloud data services and developer tools, IBM will build on that expertise to help clients and partners integrate data from an unprecedented number of IoT and traditional sources. These resources will be made available on an open platform to provide manufacturers with the ability to design and produce a new generation of connected devices that are better optimized for the IoT, and to help business leaders across industries create systems that better fuse enterprise and IoT data to inform decision-making.

“Our knowledge of the world grows with every connected sensor and device, but too often we are not acting on it, even when we know we can ensure a better result,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president, IBM Analytics. “IBM will enable clients and industry partners apply IoT data to build solutions based on an open platform. This is a major focus of investment for IBM because it’s a rich and broad-based opportunity where innovation matters.”

IBM estimates that 90 percent of all data generated by devices such as smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances is never analyzed or acted on. As much as 60 percent of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated. To address this challenge, IBM is announcing it will offer:

• IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform for Industries: This platform will provide new analytics services that clients, partners and IBM will use to design and deliver vertical industry IoT solutions.  For example, IBM will introduce a cloud-based service that helps insurance companies extract insight from connected vehicles. This will enable new, more dynamic pricing models and the delivery of services that can be highly customized to individual drivers.
• IBM Bluemix IoT Zone: New IoT services as part of IBM’s Bluemix platform-as-a-service will enable developers to easily integrate IoT data into cloud-based development and deployment of IoT apps. Developers will be able to enrich existing business applications – such as enterprise asset management, facilities management, and software engineering design tools – by infusing more real-time data and embedded analytics to further automate and optimize mission-critical IoT processes.
• IBM IoT Ecosystem: Expansion of its ecosystem of IoT partners – from silicon and device manufacturers to industry-oriented solution providers – such as AT&T, ARM, Semtech and newly announced The Weather Company – to ensure the secure and seamless integration of data services and solutions on IBM’s open platform.

IBM’s capabilities are illustrated in a new global strategic alliance announced today with The Weather Company through WSI, its global B2B division. WSI’s forecasting system ingests and processes data from thousands of sources, resulting in approximately 2.2 billion unique forecast points worldwide, and averages more than 10 billion forecasts a day on active weather days. The IoT and cloud computing allow for collection of data from more than 100,000 weather sensors and aircraft, millions of smartphones, buildings and even moving vehicles. The two companies will help industries utilize their understanding of weather on business outcomes and take action systemically to optimize those parts of their businesses.

The new unit will be led by Pat Toole as General Manager.

For more information on IBM’s Internet of Things business, please visit www.ibm.com/IoT
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As a leader in building practical IoT applications for the enterprise, IBM is working with a broad range of global clients, including:

• Continental is jointly developing fully-connected mobile vehicle solutions with IBM for car manufacturers around the world.
• Cummins Inc. collects and transmits real-time performance data of its engines for predictive analysis with IBM IoT solutions to maintain higher operating levels and reduce downtimes.
• Pratt & Whitney is using IBM IoT solutions, including predictive analytics, to more accurately and proactively monitor the health of more than 4,000 commercial engines.
• SilverHook Powerboats is using IBM’s IoT Foundation service to access and analyze telematic and biometric data from its boats and pilots to make real-time racing decisions.
• IBM is engaged in a partnership with the University of South Carolina to produce more insights on predictive maintenance, combining deep industry expertise from the university’s Condition-based Maintenance Research Center with predictive analytics software and skills from IBM.
• Whirlpool Corporation is leveraging IBM's IoT and predictive maintenance and quality solutions to improve the performance and reliability of its appliances.

IBM also has been helping cities around the world become smarter by designing strategies for collecting, sharing, analyzing and acting on data. For example:

Smarter Cities

• Miami-Dade County, Florida is working with IBM on a Smarter Cities initiative to improve services for residents and help agencies share information among the 34 municipalities within the county. The project spans multiple areas including using data from smart meters to analyze and detect water leaks in the Parks, Recreation, & Open Spaces Department; a project to improve the efficiency of buses for the Transit Department, and predictive policing and real-time crime analytics with the Miami-Dade County Police.
• In Montpellier, France the fastest growing city in France, IBM Intelligent Operations delivered via the cloud helps the the District Council set up and experiment services for water management, mobility and emergency management.
  
  Smarter Buildings
• Carnegie Mellon University is using IBM IoT solutions to reduce energy and facility operating costs. Currently in a pilot program, it will eventually be deployed across 36 buildings on its Pittsburgh campus.
• The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is working with IBM to develop and install advanced smart building technology in 50 of the federal government’s highest energy-consuming buildings.

Smarter Public Safety

• The Rochester, Minnesota Police Department is mining, sharing and extracting intelligence from data by working with IBM to improve officer safety, criminal investigations and crime prevention programs.

Smarter Transportation

• In Dublin, Ireland, the city is working with IBM to identify and solve the root causes of traffic congestion in its public transport network.
• In Melbourne, Australia, Yarra Trams is using IBM technology to access real-time information about service disruptions, tram performance and tram locations.

Smarter Water

• In Canada, the Southern Ontario Water Consortium is working with IBM using sophisticated tools to understand watershed dynamics, safeguard drinking water and forecast the impact of growth. The new platform analyzes data collected every 15 minutes and assimilates 600 data points per hour from more than 100 sensors.

Additionally, IBM also has partnered with a number of IoT ecosystem leaders, with more to come. For example:

• AT&T and IBM combined their analytic platforms, cloud, and security technologies to gain more insights on data collected from machines in a variety of industries.
• ARM and IBM partnered to combine ARM’s leadership in the embedded market utilizing the ARM® mbed™ platform with IBM’s leadership in Big Data, Analytics and Cloud Services to provide an easy to use Starter kit, enabling IoT developers to rapidly achieve end to end development from device through cloud services.
• IBM Research and Semtech announced a new technology based on low-power, wide-area networks that offers significant advantages over cellular networks and wifi for providing machine-to-machine (M2M) communications.
• ESRI, a market leader in Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, has a long history of collaborating with IBM on the development of IoT solutions that bring mapping and spatial analysis to businesses and government institutions around the globe.

Contact(s) information
Lucy Linthwaite
UK External Relations
+44-07920 823429
lucy.linthwaite@uk.ibm.com

John Galvez
UK External Relations
+44-7734-104275

john.galvez@uk.ibm.com

Source: IBM

SmartPatch Selects ThingWorx IoT Platform for its Connected, Wireless Structural Health Monitoring System

10 March 2015 – ThingWorx, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and leading Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced today that SmartPatch, an Italian startup company that develops structural health monitoring solutions, has selected ThingWorx to view and understand the data from its connected, wireless applications. These SmartPatch applications help monitor the structural integrity of buildings, bridges, tunnels and monuments.

SmartPatch has developed a patented solution for Structural Health Monitoring that is wireless, low cost and easy to implement. The company is using the ThingWorx IoT platform via a browser connected to a cloud server for its advanced graphical user interface to enable real-time, detailed monitoring of data points such as strain, temperature, tilt and seismic activity. The system will offer a comprehensive view of the measured point and offer immediate data for interpretation and possible action.

“The ThingWorx based system can change the approach to viewing and understanding Structural Health Management data by builders, certification companies, state safety agencies, civil engineers and professionals in the building industry,” said Marco Bonvino, co-founder at SmartPatch. “In our opinion ThingWorx is the most complete IoT platform available on the market and we look forward to making this technology available to our customers.”

In addition to using the ThingWorx IoT platform, SmartPatch is also taking advantage of PTC Creo to offer new graphical visualization of the infrastructure, implementing a rotating 3D model.

“SmartPatch is a good example of how IoT technology can transform existing business processes such as structural health monitoring to enable a step change in efficiency and responsiveness, ” said Russ Fadel, president, ThingWorx. “The age of the Internet of Things is upon us and forward thinking companies, such as SmartPatch, will use the ThingWorx IoT platform to deliver business value to their customers.”

Additional Resources

• ThingWorx Application Development Platform Overview
• LiveWorx IoT Industry Conference; May 4-7, 2015 at Westin Copley, Boston, MA
• “How Smart, Connected Products are Transforming Business” Harvard Business Review article

About SmartPatch
SmartPatch is an Italian startup company, which was founded in early 2014 by Marco Bonvino, Guido Maisto e Melanie Diziol. SmartPatch operates within I3P, the Innovative Enterprise Incubator of the Politecnico di Torino, and is one of the 155 European companies to receive funding under the Horizon2020 EU program. In 2014 its innovative Structural Health Monitoring system for buildings and infrastructures was awarded the Start Cup Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta and was ranked first at the Italian Venture Forum. SmartPatch is already developing applications and implementing pilot plants for well-known players in civil construction, composite building and infrastructure industries. For more information please visit http://www.smart-patch.com/.

About ThingWorx, a PTC Business
ThingWorx™, a PTC (Nasdaq: PTC) business, provides the first platform designed to efficiently build and run the applications of today's connected world. ThingWorx, the centerpiece of PTC’s Internet of Things (IoT) technology portfolio, combines capabilities from PTC Axeda® solutions to deliver the world’s first complete IoT Platform, which includes connectivity, device cloud, business logic, big data, analytics and remote service applications. The combination delivers a comprehensive IoT technology stack that enables companies to securely connect assets, quickly create applications, and innovate new ways to capture value. Companies already leveraging this technology to capitalize on the potential of the IoT represent a wide range of markets, including manufacturing, energy, agriculture, transportation, and government. For more information, please visit www.thingworx.com, www.axeda.com, and www.PTC.com or follow us on Twitter at @ThingWorx, @Axeda, and @PTC.

Source: ThingWorx

Semtech and Actility Partner for Fast Adoption of LoRaWAN™ Technology for IoT

5 March 2015 – Semtech Corp. (Nasdaq: SMTC), a leading supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors, today announced that Actility, a leading Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) solution provider, has been selected for deployment by four operators, including Swisscom and NKE Electronics, for LoRaWAN™ deployments.

The Actility ThingPark solution is a complete solution for large scale LPWAN deployments using the LoRaWAN technology, which is now being standardized by the LoRa Alliance. The LoRa Alliance is one of the fast growing alliances with the members focused on collaboratively driving the LoRaWAN™ protocol global success, by sharing knowledge and experience to ensure interoperability among all telecom operators and private networks deploying the technology. The LoRaWAN protocol offers many benefits over competing technologies, such as bi-directionality, security, mobility for asset tracking, and accurate localization.

“Time-to-market is critical for operators that want to capture the IoT opportunity. We have taken a holistic approach with a platform that addresses not only core network management, but also customer enrollment, activation and billing and facilitates purchasing of third party value-added services. We can enable commercial LPWA networks in less than a month,“ said Olivier Hersent, CEO of Actility and secretary of the technical working group of the LoRa Alliance.

“Actility has been a key contributor to the LoRaWAN specification and a sponsor member of the LoRa Alliance,” said Hardy Schmidbauer, Director of Wireless Products and IoT at Semtech. “The Actility solution is a proven solution ready for large-scale network deployments now.”

“La Poste is engaged on a strategy to develop new services leveraging its brand and its strong customer interaction network. We believe that building a LoRaWAN-based network for the Internet of Things could be a key element in this strategy and that Actility could be a key solution provider to help us build this network and launch innovative IoT-based services,” said Rémi Karcher, Project Director at La Poste.

Actility also announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona its technology partnership with Swisscom around LoRaWAN-based networks.

“We foresee a significant increase in demand for low power wide area network-based solutions in the market,” said Gerhard Schedler, Head of M2M at Swisscom. “We feel that Actility serves as an important ecosystem and technology partner as we explore new opportunities to meet the diverse and emerging needs of our customers.”

Following the announcement of the LoRa Alliance, Semtech and Actility have seen a significant increase in available applications and sensors with the LoRaWAN protocol across all key IoT markets with clear focus on smart energy, smart city and smart building applications.

The ThingPark Wireless sensor partner program makes it easy for manufacturers of legacy ISM-band solutions to integrate with the ThingPark Wireless network via LoRaWAN and also benefit from Actility’s online ThingPark Store (http://store.thingpark.com/thingpark-store/).

This online marketplace provides all the tools that allow a partner to install base stations and manage a regional network, using the same tools as much larger national operators.

For Jean-Claude Le Bleis, CEO of NKE Electronics and a key ThingPark Wireless partner, “LoRaWAN is an ideal wireless protocol for industrial and smart building sensors. The dynamic data rate provides the flexibility to run high resolution sensing applications with private networks, or lower resolution monitoring applications, with the same products. We have products ramping to production for temperature, humidity monitoring, and metering with energy harvesting sensors.”

About Actility
Actility is an industry leader in LPWA (Low Power Wide Area) large scale infrastructure with ThingPark®, a new generation standard-based M2M communication platform. Actility’s ThingPark Wireless® network provides long-range coverage for low-power sensors used in SmartCity, SmartBuilding and SmartFactory applications. Actility also provides the ThingPark Cloud which provides big data storage for sensor data and exposes sensor function through an open API allowing developers to provide vertical applications on top of rolled out sensors. To help vendors transform their sensors, Actility provides the ThingPark IoT platform, which includes embedded software solutions and cloud solutions to help devices connect to innovative applications. Actility is a founding member of the LoRa Alliance, one of the largest, most powerful standards-based effort to enable the Internet of Things (IoT). Visit www.actility.com.

About Semtech
Semtech Corporation is a leading supplier of analog and mixed-signal semiconductors for high-end consumer, computing, communications and industrial equipment. Products are designed to benefit the engineering community as well as the global community. The company is dedicated to reducing the impact it, and its products, have on the environment. Internal green programs seek to reduce waste through material and manufacturing control, use of green technology and designing for resource reduction. Semtec has been publicly traded since 1967. For more information, visit www.semtech.com.

Source: Business Wire

SAP and Jasper Team Up for Internet of Things (IoT) Services Initiative

3 March 2015 – SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) and Jasper today announced they are collaborating to help enterprises simplify the process of deploying and managing Internet of Things (IoT) services on a global scale. Together, SAP and Jasper will team to offer integration of their solutions designed to help simplify and dramatically shorten the time to launch, manage and monetize IoT services. The announcement was made at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

The Jasper Control Center platform, which automates the lifecycle of IoT services, is planned to integrate with the SAP HANA® platform, creating business value for customers and partners by analyzing service subscription and usage data. Enterprises are also expected to benefit from the SAP Fiori® user experience (UX), which offers a simple, personalized and responsive UX for SAP® software.

“Jasper has helped over 1,600 enterprises across more than 20 industries around the world transform from product businesses to service businesses,” said Jahangir Mohammed, founder and CEO, Jasper. “We believe having the Jasper platform integrated with SAP HANA will increase business value by providing actionable insights into Big Data and shortening the time to market for IoT services. We are delighted to collaborate with SAP to work to bring these new capabilities to enterprise customers globally.”

“SAP helps simplify the Internet of Things for business to better drive innovation,” said Michael Lynch, global IoT co-lead, SAP. “The collaboration with Jasper is planned to allow us to remove friction from the existing complexity of deploying IoT solutions. With SAP solutions for the IoT, we help our customers introduce new service-based business models that can help drive a competitive advantage.”

SAP and Jasper have completed a successful proof-of-concept test with a pilot customer and are collaborating on go-to-market strategies.
For more information, please visit the SAP News Center. Follow SAP on Twitter at @sapnews.

About Jasper
Jasper is a global Internet of Things (IoT) platform leader. Jasper has designed its industry-leading software-as-a-service (SaaS) IoT platform to enable companies of all sizes to rapidly and cost-effectively launch, manage and monetize IoT services on a global scale. When companies do this, they become much more than product businesses. They become service businesses, capable of automatically managing their customers’ entire IoT service lifecycle, delivering increased customer value and unlocking new sources of revenue. More than 1,600 companies in over 20 vertical markets, including many of the world’s top brands, choose Jasper to fast-track their IoT services. Jasper currently partners with 24 mobile operator groups, representing more than 100 mobile operator networks worldwide.

Founded in 2004, Jasper is based in Santa Clara, California. For more information, visit www.jasper.com or follow us on Twitter @Jasper_IoT. To learn more about enterprises building IoT services that demonstrate what's possible when the digital and physical worlds converge, check out their stories at www.TitansofIoT.com.

About SAP
As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 282,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably.

Source: Jasper