IBM Vision and Business Organization

On September 15th, IBM announced the formation of its Internet of Things (IoT) business unit. Soon to have 2,000+ employees, this business unit will also benefit from a long term $3 billion investment to advance technologies, services and tools for IBM’s IoT customers.

Supporting IBM’s actions are a belief that IoT presents a significant business opportunity for the company and their customers. At a recent briefing, IBM cited IoT Platforms, IoT Applications & Solutions and IoT [Business] Transformation services as having potential addressable markets of $14B, $117B and $88B respectively. Of note were the more than 10x larger combined addressable markets for applications and business transformation when compared to platforms. At first I was skeptical about the allocation of potential opportunity, I thought that platforms had more potential. Why so much less for IoT Platforms? But upon further reflection, it makes sense.

In figure 1 below IBM explains their value add as a hierarchy of Performance Management, Asset Management and Platform Services respectively for their identified market segments of IoT Transformation, Applications & Services and Platforms. (See figure 1 below). IBM’s categorization of Performance Management as a value-add for IoT is a great idea. In fact, IoT is all about enhancing business/personal performance through the optimization of asset use in support of that performance. It also fully embraces the bigger IoT promise of combining device data with other external and business data to gain broader systemic cause/effect insights.

Figure 1.

Also interesting is IBM’s stated aim to be more of a business partner and less of a technology vendor for its customers. With IBM’s manufacturing and industrial customers seeking expand their revenue by adding IoT-based services, IBM sees itself as the business partner who can build and deploy those service applications. It will be interesting to watch the chess game play out to decide who owns the application and has control of the service revenue. Will it be IBM or its customers?

IBM Partnerships and Developer Support

In support of its IoT initiative, IBM has established partnerships with the following technology providers:

• Texas Instruments –To secure IoT devices using a Secure Registry Service to provide trust and authentication for provisioning, activating, registering using and retiring of connected devices.
• National Instruments –To develop and use an IoT test bed for researching industrial equipment failure prevention and maintenance.
• Airbus –To enhance IBM’s Maximo asset management solution for aviation MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) and fleet lifecycle management.
• ARM –To provide out-of-the-box connectivity to ARM’s mbed™ enabled semiconductor devices. This simplifies registration and communication between mbed-enabled chips and IBM’s IoT Foundation platform.

In addition to these major partner announcements, IBM recently announced a new developer community, IBM DeveloperWorks. On its site, ‘Recipes,’ IBM provides tutorials and code samples to simplify connecting smart devices and sensors to IBM’s Bluemix PaaS. I personally found this site valuable. I was able to connect my Raspberry Pi and visualize its CPU temperature data in about 3 minutes (figure 2). I recommend visiting the developer community and trying the Recipes.

Figure 2

IBM IoT Foundation Platform

The IBM’s IoT Foundation technology platform is being built from existing IBM products plus new offerings. Its planned architecture can be broken down into six categories:

• Connect (device connection, management, communication, security)
• Information  Management (data & metadata management, transformation)
• Risk Management (security)
• Analytics (descriptive, predictive, cognitive)
• Services (IBM’s Bluemix PaaS)
• IBM Deployment  Services (hosting)

IBM Products currently announced as core to its IoT Foundation are:

• IBM Datapower Gateway – a multi-channel workload distribution gateway
• IBM Application  Server Liberty Core – a lightweight web app server
• IBM Informix  TimeSeries – a time series-capable RDBMS
• IBM MessageSight – MQTT-based messaging server appliance
• IBM Cloudant – a NoSQL database-as-a-server
• IBM SoftLayer – a portfolio of datacenters and network points

Running on top of this infrastructure is IBM’s Bluemix  Platform-as-a-Service. The Bluemix services catalog is extensive. Both IBM and 3rd party services are listed. Example services include app server runtimes for Java, Go, PHP and Python, various Watson-branded machine learning modules, mobile connectivity components, deployment services, application components such as workflow, rules engines, geocoding, Spark, Hadoop, PostgreSQL and reporting among many others.

Altogether, the IBM IoT Foundation platform is extensive, complex, highly configurable, scalable and capable. However stitching together IoT applications from this vast product array may require a team of experienced architects to assure that deployments work flawlessly in the field. And once deployed, if an issue emerges, IBM will need efficient coordination within their support organization to assure that resolution occurs quickly and cost effectively.

Take-Aways

If you are a Global 2000 company, IBM is an obvious candidate to engage as a partner to deploy IoT systems due to their experience, global reach, depth of technology, comprehensive services offerings and ability to assist segment leaders maintain their position. For smaller organizations, IBM as a short list member for IoT system technology and services may be less clear. The complexity of their services may be relatively more costly and less agile than simpler alternatives.