IBM says 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 systems.
IBM’s work in Smarter Planet and Smarter Cities was based on practical applications of IoT in the enterprise and led to a broad set of products, ranging from water management to alleviating traffic congestion.
With new industry-specific cloud data services and developer tools, IBM plans 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, the company says.
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 says it will offer:
