IBM’s IOT Push: It’s All about Business Transformation
"When we think of the Internet of things, we don’t just think about data in the cloud, we think about how to build devices, organise their information flows and operate the devices around assets and the management life cycles of the assets”
Christopher O'Connor, General Manager, Internet of Things, IBM
Interview by Abraham Joseph, Editorial Director, IOT Insights
What is IBM’s position on IOT?
We have been around this space – which has had a variety of names – for many years. We have a strong presence in IT data centres and for many years we’ve been providing a range of solutions that take a set of physical devices, convert their outputs to digital data, analyse this data and provide information for business decisions. (Read more...)
Dell Partners With ThingWorx to Deliver IoT Services to Enterprise Customers
28 May 2015 - Dell Services today announced an agreement with ThingWorx, a PTC business, aimed at helping customers on their IoT journey via the ThingWorx IoT platform. Dell Services offers a combination of technology and business expertise to help customers reduce the time, cost and risk required to build innovative Internet of Things (IoT) applications. As a part of the agreement, Dell’s Digital Business Services has joined the ThingWorx System Integrator Program.
As a ThingWorx system integrator partner, Dell Services offers the power of digital capabilities across cloud, mobility, social media, big data and digital transformation consulting to deliver comprehensive professional services dedicated to IoT.
Dell’s end-to-end portfolio is tailored for specific industries including healthcare, manufacturing, banking, and more and spans advisory, solution design, application development, implementation and managed services. Dell leverages investments in its Silicon Valley-based Internet of Things Lab jointly funded by Intel to design and launch solutions including smart buildings and connected products as well as next generation insurance, for customers.
In 2014, Dell and Intel began collaborating on IoT solutions for customer projects such as building automation for smart buildings. They are also both part of the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) that sets standards for connecting a multitude of household gadgets and appliances.
“Our customers today are seeing true business value in the Internet of Things, which is occupying a prominent place on their digital business agenda,” said Raman Sapra, executive director and global head, Dell Digital Business Services. “Our relationship with ThingWorx is yet another step towards helping our enterprise customers realize the business benefits of IoT through a consulting-led approach.”
The ThingWorx System Integrator Program consists of consulting and services companies that provide deep and proven delivery capabilities, and executive commitment to the ThingWorx product line.
With the ever-growing number of smart, connected products and sensors, the true potential of IoT lies in integrating people, systems and things, and developing new innovative applications that disrupt the way industries work. The ThingWorx platform offers one of the most comprehensive IoT solution stacks in the industry, providing a unified experience for customers to develop solutions for smart connected products.
“We are happy to welcome Dell into the ThingWorx System Integrator Program. The digital services solutions offered by Dell on a global basis will help ThingWorx customers accelerate the real, tangible benefits of implementing IoT-based solutions.” said Russ Fadel President and General Manager, ThingWorx, a PTC business (left).
Today Dell also announced a new IoT gateway designed to help customers kick-start their IoT solution development and begin realizing the value of IoT. Available immediately, this gateway is an integral part of Dell’s portfolio of IoT-enabling technologies. Customers that invest in early pilots with this product will have a competitive advantage and the flexibility to build on their systems with the upcoming release of Dell’s purpose-built IoT gateway. Additionally the Dell IoT gateway will participate in the ThingWorx Ready program, designed to validate interoperability between complementary products and the ThingWorx platform.
Dell and IoT
Dell cuts through the hype with a pragmatic approach to the Internet of Things and helps its customers leverage existing equipment and data to make the most of current technology investments. Dell customers can take advantage of analytics scenarios that span gateways, datacenter cloud and services leading to analytics-driven action. The Dell portfolio, combined with a rich partner ecosystem, deep vertical and domain expertise, and a collaborative approach enables Dell to provide end-to-end IoT solutions.
ThingWorx System Integrator Program
ThingWorx Partners provide a wide variety of products and services throughout the entire IoT value chain – from software systems and cloud platforms to smart sensors, devices, gateways and system integration services that make the connected world a reality. The ThingWorx Partner Program allows System Integrators to enable their teams with expertise around the ThingWorx rapid application development platform greatly simplifying the architecture, implementation and deployment of IoT solutions. ThingWorx system integrator partners reduce the cost and risk of Internet of Things deployments for end customers, helping accelerate the growth of the overall space.
Source: Dell
iYogi Launches IoT Platform Based on Microsoft Azure
28 May 2015 – iYogi, the Gurgaon, India-based support services company today reported that it has launched an enterprise-grade Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Platform. Built on Microsoft Azure, the platform is said to scale to millions of devices. Innovators can use the platform to deploy, monitor and automatically manage their products across millions of end users, easily integrate their products with the growing IoT ecosystem, and use its advanced analytics capabilities to build and fast track their global growth strategies.
iYogi's Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Platform is the latest version of the company's Digital Service Cloud, one of the world’s largest SaaS based digital device management platforms. It uses various Azure modules including the Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hub, Azure DocumentDB and Azure Machine Learning as its foundation, and builds on these to create a fault-tolerant architecture containing a proprietary rules engine, a reporting engine, an event configurator and a universal UI which enables the creation of deep connections within the IoT ecosystem. The platform also incorporates high data security and privacy standards.
Mr. Anil Reddy, Head – Strategy, Microsoft India said, “As IoT moves towards becoming an essential fabric of business, our partners are doing very interesting things with Microsoft Azure. Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Platform is a good example of global innovation. It builds on Azure’s capabilities and can help IoT companies rapidly reach millions of customers across the globe. This will jump start innovation in IoT, amongst businesses of all sizes and maturity, across a variety of segments. This would help them serve their customers better by building on newer scenarios and capabilities enabled by IoT and Microsoft Azure.”
Commenting on the launch of the platform, Uday Challu, CEO of iYogi said, “Recognizing the potential economic and social impact of IoT, the global technology industry is witnessing a burst of innovation. A platform that brings this innovation ecosystem together is essential to propel the industry further.”
“More than four years, and $35 million have gone into the development of our platform – and we believe this is exactly what is needed by IoT innovators. It’s easy to set up, and can scale from one-digit to over a million transactions quickly,” he added.
iYogi has also launched the Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Partner Program, to support the growth of the IoT ecosystem. Under the program, start-ups can use the platform for free, for up-to one million devices, and will receive additional resources and development support. The company plans to create a showcase of more than 100 IoT solutions over the next one year.
Current use cases of the platform exist across smart cities, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, automotive and home automation segments. Early adopters of the platform and members of the Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Partner Program include:
- COOEY, a family health-monitoring platform that collects, analyses and provides insights about patient data.
- SmartBuildings which improves comfort, health and energy efficiency in commercial buildings via 24×7 monitoring and control of air conditioning systems.
- Yuvera whose omni-channel retail product Linqs enables customers to digitally explore products in-store.
About Digital Service Cloud
Digital Service Cloud is one of the world’s largest SaaS based digital device management platform with more than 12 million devices under management. It is aimed at assisting telecom service providers, OEMs and technology retailers to improve customer support, and generate new revenues.
The platform is being used globally to service customers of brands like Toshiba, Lexmark, ViaSat, The Source, AVG, Earthlink, Telefonica and Airtel. The Digital Service Cloud Open IoT Platform builds on the existing capabilities of this platform. For more information please visit www.digitalservicecloud.com/.
Source: iYogi
Samsung Launches ARTIK IOT Platform
12 May 2015: In a keynote address at Internet of Things World, the President and Chief Strategy Officer of Samsung Electronics., Young Sohn called on the technology industry to use the Internet of Things (IoT) to address major challenges the world faces today. He also emphasized the importance of open platforms and industry collaboration to accelerate development of new IoT applications and services.
“We need to create powerful open platforms that will harness the information generated by IoT to develop new insights and new approaches to meet the challenges we face as a society.”
“As an industry we must join together to use the power of IoT to address challenges posed by issues such as aging population demographics, water shortages, increasing traffic congestion, pollution and major health issues,” said Sohn. “We need to create powerful open platforms that will harness the information generated by IoT to develop new insights and new approaches to meet the challenges we face as a society.”
To enable faster deployment of IoT applications and services, Sohn announced the Samsung ARTIK™ platform. ARTIK is a production-ready, open platform that includes the hardware, software, development boards, drivers, tools, advanced security features and connectivity for rapidly building cloud-connected IoT devices. The ARTIK platform comes in a variety of configurations to meet the specific requirements of a wide range of IoT market segments from wearables and home automation, to smart lighting and industrial applications. More information on the ARTIK platform can be found by visiting www.artik.io.
SmartThings Founder and CEO Alex Hawkinson joined with Young Sohn during his keynote to introduce SmartThings Open Cloud. Open Cloud is powered by SAMI, a data driven development platform that Samsung announced last May that includes simple, open APIs and SDKs. The open platform is a cloud-based software layer that allows the sharing of diverse data sets from an unlimited number of sources. This vast amount of data, which previously would have been impossible to bring together, can then be broken up into smaller chunks for visualization and analysis.
SmartThings Open Cloud allows any device connected to the Internet to communicate with any other connected device, generating new information, new correlations and entirely new insights. It enables device makers to focus on building IoT devices and applications without having to build and maintain the cloud infrastructure required to connect those devices.
To demonstrate the potential for IoT to meet major societal challenges, Sohn also announced the Samsung ARTIK Challenge – offering a top prize of $100,000 for the most effective use of IoT and ARTIK technology for reducing water consumption by individuals or municipalities.
More information on the Samsung ARTIK Challenge can be found at ARTIK.challengepost.com.
Throughout his keynote address, Sohn underscored the importance of open platforms, security and an ecosystem of partners that are all necessary to accelerate the growth of IoT and achieve its full benefits. He was joined on stage by representatives of several startup companies Samsung is working with to develop technologies based on open platforms. In addition, the company announced that the Samsung ARTIK platform would be incorporated into future versions of Samsung digital appliances and that those appliances would also connect to the SmartThings Open Cloud.
About the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center (SSIC)
SSIC is a global organization within Samsung’s Device Solutions division, with the core missions of open innovation in collaboration with entrepreneurs and strategic partners, investments in disruptive technologies and startups, and new business creation through M&A and partnerships. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, with offices in Korea, Israel and the U.K., SSIC’s focus areas include cloud infrastructure, digital health, Internet of Things, smart lighting, and smart machines.
About Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. inspires the world and shapes the future with transformative ideas and technologies, redefining the worlds of TVs, smartphones, wearable devices, tablets, cameras, digital appliances, printers, medical equipment, network systems, and semiconductor and LED solutions. We are also leading in the Internet of Things space through, among others, our Smart Home and Digital Health initiatives. We employ 307,000 people across 84 countries with annual sales of US $196 billion. To discover more, please visit our website at www.samsung.com and our official blog at global.samsungtomorrow.com.
Contacts
Samsung Electronics
Tom Beermann, +1-650-223-7875
tom.beermann@ssi.samsung.com
Daniel Yoo, +1-650-804-7304
dan.yoo@ssi.samsung.com
NTT DOCOMO Extends Uses of ThingWorx IoT Platform
6 May 2015 – PTC and NTT DOCOMO, INC., Japan’s largest mobile service provider, today announced the companies are expanding their relationship to extend the use of the ThingWorx IoT Development Platform at DOCOMO in order to streamline use of cloud-based IoT platforms. Serving more than 65 million mobile customers, DOCOMO operates a high-quality nationwide LTE network.
PTC and DOCOMO will continue to jointly market IoT solutions that are specifically developed for the Japanese market. ThingWorx will provide its IoT development platform for DOCOMO cloud-based software, taking advantage of its connectivity and communication technology to implement IoT solutions. Together with Nippon Systemware, a Tokyo-based system integrator with a proven track record in software and hardware development, the companies will deliver solutions that customers can use, utilizing the DOCOMO high-quality, nationwide mobile network to serve the specific needs of its individual business customers.
“The extension of our business relationship with DOCOMO is a great opportunity for businesses that want a single source for device, network and IoT solutions,” said Russ Fadel, president, ThingWorx, a PTC Business. “We look forward to continue working with DOCOMO to drive business value in the emerging IoT market.”
ThingWorx offers an innovative platform for rapidly developing and deploying applications to realize the opportunity and value presented by the Internet of Things economy. The ThingWorx simplified and unified approach to IoT applications enables companies to iteratively innovate business processes significantly faster than conventional methods and tools, thus accelerating time to value, reducing cost and risk, and transforming how products, people, and systems connect and interact.
“The ThingWorx technology enables us to rapidly generate applications that are easily extended and modified through the lifecycle of the service, giving us the ability to quickly respond to the demands of our business customers.” said Naoki Tani, managing director, M2M business department, NTT DOCOMO. “We look forward to continuing our work with PTC to offer our business customers this joint, next generation IoT solution.”
PTC and DOCOMO expect to offer business customers customizable solutions that will seamlessly integrate applications, networks and devices, helping them to transform their businesses in the IoT market.
The ThingWorx partner ecosystem offers a wide range of applications, pre-integrated software components, and skills providing the necessary building blocks required to rapidly design, build, deploy and manage IoT applications. Comprised of components that are built by ThingWorx, ThingWorx partners, third party developers, and independent hardware and software vendors, these offerings add value to all members of the IoT value chain by delivering the technology, tools and expertise to implement IoT solutions.
Source: PTC
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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
Elisa Launches New IoT Service With ThingWorx Rapid Application Development Platform
19 January 2015 – ThingWorx, a PTC® (Nasdaq: PTC) business and leading Internet of Things (IoT) platform provider, announced today that Elisa, Finnish market leader in mobile and fixed broadband subscriptions, will deploy ThingWorx's platform technology to enable a new Elisa IoT service in Finland and Estonia.
Elisa is a telecommunications, ICT and online service company serving 2.3 million customers, providing environmentally sustainable services for communication and entertainment, and tools for improving operating methods and productivity of organizations. In Finland Elisa is the market leader in mobile subscriptions and fixed broadband subscriptions.
By partnering with ThingWorx, Elisa can now enable its customers to seamlessly connect and interface with their remote devices, people, business systems and things offering the most comprehensive set of IoT services available today. The new Elisa service spans from device management to data analytics to product development, all securely backed up in Elisa-owned data centres.
“Elisa prides itself on being a forward thinking company,” said Timo Katajisto, executive vice president, Corporate Customers, Elisa. “The ThingWorx platform technology will enable complete, innovative, end-to-end solutions for Elisa customers in addition to providing an easy entry point for companies that want to realize the full value of adding connectivity to their product and service offerings.”
ThingWorx offers an innovative platform for rapidly developing and deploying applications to realize the opportunity and value presented by the Internet of Things economy. The ThingWorx simplified and unified approach to IoT applications enables companies to iteratively innovate business processes significantly faster than conventional methods and tools, thus accelerating time to value, reducing cost and risk, and transforming how products, people, and systems connect and interact.
“We are excited that ThingWorx technology will be a core aspect of the Elisa IoT Service,” said Thomas Svensson, senior vice-president and general manager EMEA, ThingWorx. “The age of the Internet of Things is upon us and working with forward thinking companies, such as Elisa, enables us to deploy our leading technology so that customers can profit from complete, end-to-end solutions.”
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 Axeda 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.
About Elisa
Elisa is a telecommunications, ICT and online service company serving 2.3 million consumer, corporate and public administration organisation customers. Elisa provides environmentally sustainable services for communication and entertainment, and tools for improving operating methods and productivity of organisations. In Finland Elisa is the market leader in mobile subscriptions and fixed broadband subscriptions. Cooperation with Vodafone and Telenor enables international use of services. Elisa is listed on Nasdaq Helsinki Large Cap with over 200 000 shareholders. Elisa’s revenue in 2013 was 1.55 billion euros and it employed 4,200 people. For more information, please visit www.elisa.com.
Source: ThingWorx
