The Week In Review: IoT

Connectivity
Longing for LightSquared? The once-bankrupt company that tried to build a network with satellite airwaves and traditional spectrum has been reborn as Ligado Networks, which wants to serve 5G and Industrial Internet of Things applications with a mobile data network, employing satellite communications and other resources. Its founder is Philip Falcone, who was the guiding force behind LightSquared, and the company makes its corporate headquarters in Reston, Va., where LightSquared was based. Ligado has reputable financial backing and highly professional management. Now, if they could only get the go-ahead from the Federal Communications Commission…

Deals
Qualcomm is teaming with Logicalis, an IT services company, to provide IoT products and services in Brazil. The partners will target agribusiness, health care, manufacturing, and smart cities in the Brazilian market, with Qualcomm providing connected sensors and other chips, while Logicalis will offer consulting, development, and integration services.

Finance
ZingBox, which offers IoT security software for connected enterprises, health care, and manufacturing, received $22 million in Series B funding led by Dell Technologies Capital and Triventures. The startup closed its Series A funding in 2015; the amount raised then wasn’t disclosed. ZingBox will add staff and expand market reach with the new money. ZingBox’s other investors are Oriza Ventures, Social Starts, StartX, and Wisemont Capital.

Products
Super Micro Computer brought out compact systems and motherboards with Intel’s Atom C3000 system-on-a-chip devices for applications in embedded appliances, intelligent data centers, and network edges. Supermicro’s A2 series motherboards feature two to 16 Atom cores.

Conferences
Parks Associates has scheduled its annual CONNECTIONS Summit: IoT and the Smart Home conference for January 9, 2018, during CES 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Topics to be discussed at the one-day conference are Support, Privacy, and Connected Consumers; Smart Home Platforms; Voice Control; Smart Home & Interoperability; Creating Compelling IoT Services with AI and Data Analytics; and Smart Home and IoT.

Recognition
Frost & Sullivan gave its 2017 North American Product Leadership Award to Mocana for its Industrial IoT security platform. The market research firm noted the Mocana platform has no open-source software and is integrated into more than 70 chipsets, complex networking environments, and 30 operating systems and real-time operating systems.

Personnel
Derek Proudian, a serial entrepreneur and a pioneer in artificial intelligence/IoT technology, was named an independent director of Montreal-based Newtrax Technologies.

Market Research
Gartner found 75% of end-user respondents said they were willing to pay more for 5G wireless communications, with 57% of those participating in the survey saying their organizations will use 5G for IoT communications. “This finding is surprising, as the number of deployed ‘things’ that need cellular connectivity won’t exceed the capacity of existing cellular IoT technologies before 2023 in most regions,” Gartner’s Sylvain Fabre said in a statement. “And even once fully implemented, 5G will suit only a narrow subset of IoT use cases that require a combination of very high data rates and very low latency. In addition, 5G won’t be ready to support massive machine-type communications, or ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, until early 2020.”

“Thingbots” are botnets that specifically aim for IoT devices, and they helped to drive a 280% increase in Telnet attack activity during the first six months of 2017, according to F5 Labs. That growth was due to the Mirai malware and subsequent attacks, the organization reports. There’s a new thingbot dubbed Persirai, F5 says.

MarketsandMarkets forecasts the IoT data management market will increase to $66.44 billion by 2022, from $27.54 billion this year, for a compound annual growth rate of 19.3%. Details on its market report are available here.

Future Market Insights predicts the worldwide IoT security product market will have a 14.9% CAGR over the next decade, increasing from more than $12 billion in 2017 to almost $50 billion by the end of 2027. A sample of the FMI report can be obtained here.