The Week In Review: IoT

Services
AT&T and IBM are expanding their joint Internet of Things effort to offer AT&T’s new IoT analytics capability, helping customers yield insights from their industrial IoT data. The capability takes in AT&T’s M2X, Flow Designer, Control Center, and other IoT offerings; IBM Watson IoT; the IBM Watson Data Platform; and the IBM Machine Learning Service, part of Watson Data Platform on the IBM Cloud.

Products
Renesas Electronics used the Cadence Perspec System Verifier for verification of a microcontroller design for IoT applications. Perspec System Verifier reduced the number of engineering hours devoted to test scenario generation by up to 90%, compared with its previous approach to system-level verification, it was said.

Samsung Electronics confirmed details about its Bixby mobile assistant, expected to be pre-installed on the new Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone, which will be formally introduced next week. The Korean company has grander ambitions for the artificial intelligence-based assistant, planning to include Bixby in Internet of Things devices, such as air conditioners, refrigerators, and televisions, and in multiple mobile devices.

Arrow Electronics is offering the MAX1000 development board, an IoT Maker Board, based on Intel’s MAX10 field-programmable gate array. The board is aimed at use by equipment manufacturers, start-ups, and universities.

Ubuntu Core has been ported to the LS1043A quad-core system-on-a-chip device under a collaboration between Canonical and NXP Semiconductors. The companies see the combination being used in IoT gateways and networking equipment.

Oracle this week unveiled the Oracle Utilities Operational Device Cloud Service, offering IoT device management and smart grid supervision. ODCS, a stand-alone cloud service, can be paired with Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Management, and it can be added to Oracle Utilities Work and Asset Cloud Services and Oracle Utilities Meter Data Analytics Cloud Service.

Bsquare debuted cross-platform IoT applications running on its DataV Hybrid IoT Platform, targeting business and industrial IoT use cases. The IIoT apps can be used in conjunction with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, along with infrastructure-as-a-service and stand-alone deployments on any cloud computing service.

Market Research
Juniper Research forecasts Bluetooth beacons, digital signs, and other products connected to IoT platforms used by retailers will increase from 2.7 billion business assets last year to 12.5 billion by 2021. Radio-frequency identification tags will come into greater use in retail over that period, having reached a lower price point for volume deployment in the IoT retail ecosystem, Juniper predicts.

The industrial IoT market will add more than 13 million new wireline and wireless connections around the world this year, on top of an installed base of 53 million connections, according to ABI Research. The Asia-Pacific region is expected to add more than 5 million IIoT connections in 2017. ABI says industrial manufacturing applications will generate more than $138 million this year from cellular and satellite connectivity fees.

Conferences
The Internet of Things Applications conference takes place on May 10-11 in Berlin, Germany. The event is being put on by IDTechEx. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and IBM are scheduled to make presentations, while Raspberry Pi will be exhibiting at the show.