IBM Internet of Things (IoT) event held at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC

Yesterday's IBM Internet of Things (IoT) event held at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC demonstrated some of the capabilities of its new IoT unit – which is expected to grow substantially with an investment of $3 billion over the next four years.  ARC attended the event, and saw the product announcements, customer presentations, and product demonstrations.  The IBM announcements involved software and services to create, build, and manage the connected products and systems for IoT solutions. 

• IBM IoT Cloud Open Platform and Bluemix IoT Zone involved 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 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.
• Collaboration with Texas Instruments (TI) to develop a secure, cloud-hosted provisioning and lifecycle management service for IoT devices.  IoT devices using TI chips with unique identifiers that IBM's software recognize as friendly endpoints.  IBM will create a Secure Registry Service for trust and authentication practices and protocol from silicon embedded in devices/products to businesses and homes. The collaboration will target the processes involved in provisioning, activating, registering, de-registering and eventually retiring IoT assets securely.  IBM and TI will make the APIs public and available for use by other IoT cloud service providers and other silicon vendors.
• IBM Aviation Maintenance solution for maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) for high reliability of complex, safety critical aviation components.  IoT, data collection and analytics provide assessments to assure high reliability.
• IBM Product Line Engineering (PLE) solutions to design, develop, deliver, and evolve a portfolio of products with variations in features and functions.  Equipment manufacturers use this to add IoT to existing products.

The customers provided insights into the deployment of these solutions.  Examples include:

• Gary Gauthier shared how DTE Energy uses industrial IoT in the energy business.  Smart meters do more than just billing.  Data from smart meters combined with analytics sense and respond to current events to improve uptime and outage response.
• Kevin Massey of Cummins reviewed the recently announced Cummins Connect Diagnostics service that uses industrial IoT to monitor engine condition & performance.  When an issue is identified, the engine owner is notified.  The service can notify a service depot and issue a work request for scheduling.  There is no charge for this service (other than buying a Cummins engine).
• David Kenny, CEO, The Weather Company (TWC) talked about how they daily do 11 billion local forecasts worldwide, and on a bad weather day do 26 billion. They use partnerships with Apple (for data from cell phones) & IBM (for analytics and cloud).  An example of the business use of these forecasts is helping airlines route planes to reduce aircraft turbulence, and save maintenance cost.  Mr. Kenny referred to IoT when he stated, "The world will be a better place when it is smarter."

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.  The collaboration with TI promises to provide a new level of security for IoT solutions.