IBM Helps Ecosystem of Partners, Clients Build 'Internet of Things' Solutions

Building off of IBM's recent investment of $3 billion over the next four years to establish a new 'Internet of Things' (IoT) unit, IBM announced new software and services to enable an ecosystem of partners and clients to more efficiently create, build, and manage the connected products and systems at the heart of the IoT:

• IBM IoT Industry Solutions: two new industry solutions, including an IBM Aviation Maintenance solution to optimize the availability and extend the life of complex, safety critical aviation components; and IBM Product Line Engineering (PLE) capabilities to help engineers more efficiently customize product designs for specific markets.
• IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform and Bluemix IoT Zone: three new IBM IoT Cloud solutions and eight new IBM IoT Consulting Services offerings based on Bluemix IoT Zone. These include an IBM Real-time Asset Management solution that provides IBM's digital innovation platform users with insights into asset conditions to increase visibility and speed resolution of issues; IBM Managed Continuous Engineering for the IoT to help organizations to increase the speed of development of IoT devices and products by enabling real-time feedback into engineering; and a new IBM IoT Workbench service for modeling the design and impact of IoT systems.
• IBM IoT Ecosystem: a new collaboration with Texas Instruments (TI) to develop a secure, cloud-hosted provisioning and lifecycle management service for IoT devices.

IBM and TI are collaborating to develop IBM's secure, cloud-hosted provisioning and lifecycle management service for IoT devices. Through its collaboration with TI, IBM will create a Secure Registry Service that will provide trust and authentication practices and protocol across the value chain – from silicon embedded in devices/products to businesses and homes.

The IBM Cloud-hosted service will work with a silicon token from which a device can have its identity more securely managed. The collaboration will target the processes involved in provisioning, activating, registering, de-registering and eventually retiring IoT assets simply and more securely, while at the same time facilitating communications from the IoT device to the cloud.

IBM and TI plan to make the provisioning life cycle management service available to all cloud service providers and all silicon vendors. Accordingly, IBM and TI will make the APIs public and available for use by other IoT cloud service providers and other silicon vendors.

Ralph Rio, ARC Advisory Group, commented “The new IBM IoT unit brings into focus several of its assets for a new generation of applications using analytics, asset management, intelligent devices, and even cognitive computing.  IBM Bluemix has matured into a feature rich PaaS for development and deployment of these applications.”

Keywords: Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud-hosted, Industry Solutions, Product Line Engineering (PLE), Real-time Asset Management, ARC Advisory Group.