When The IoT Really Works

The IoT is a transformational tool for business. It gives them superpowers they never had before.

This holds true whether it’s an energy provider drawing data from its infrastructure to sense failures, a sensor-equipped building anticipating and then proactively dealing with occupants’ needs,  or a retailer using data streams from its stores and warehouses to streamline operations.

But unlike fictional superheroes who are often born with their abilities, any business wanting to develop IoT superpowers requires help. That must come from the technology sector, and three specific elements: investment, solutions and ecosystems.

IoT investment is evident, with the $100 billion SoftBank Vision Fund being a prime example of major support in advanced technologies. For solutions, we need to make it easy for organizations to provision, update, connect and manage devices, as well as make sense of the incredible amount of diverse data that the IoT is generating. Lastly, IoT requires a strong ecosystem of companies working together to deliver value. A single company cannot solve everything alone.

The data problem
An Information Age article summed up the massive data explosion, when they cited IDC predictions that 163 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created or copied by 2025. That’s ten times the 16.1ZB of data generated as of 2016. However, according to a 2018 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Arm, 67 percent of organizations face challenges with data silos and more than half struggle with data preparation.

To deal with data volumes and complexity, businesses need to be able to seamlessly connect and manage their IoT devices, as well as manage their data flows. Arm has focused on supporting companies with this for several years, but a full solution taking care of all of a company’s data needs, from device-to-data, has only become possible today after we acquired Treasure Data.

Treasure Data is a global leader in enterprise data management providing the ability to aggregate and translate massive volumes of scattered and siloed data. The company’s technology deals with data from any source – CRM, ecommerce systems, edge, IoT devices, and any third-party data. The result for customers is an ability to derive meaningful and actionable insights from any disparate data mix.

Treasure Data is the final piece of our IoT enablement puzzle. Its technology, along with that of another recent acquisition (Stream) for connectivity management, combined with Arm Mbed Cloud and our knowledge of the IoT hardware foundation creates something entirely new. We call it the Arm Pelion IoT Platform.

Pelion’s mission
The Pelion IoT Platform will enable companies to seamlessly and securely connect and manage IoT devices and data at any scale. It’s designed to work on public and private clouds, on-premises and in hybrid environments, delivering ultimate flexibility in IoT system architectures. This will allow companies to quickly turn IoT and enterprise data into insights capable of unlocking new opportunities for them and their customers. The Pelion IoT Platform will also provide unified billing that lowers infrastructure costs, increases operational efficiency, and eliminates integration headaches.

The Pelion IoT Platform will make IoT outcomes real by delivering:

• Device Management – Secure and consistent IoT device provisioning, identity and access management and updates for any system set-up;
• Connectivity Management – Support for a range of wireless connectivity standards for any device, region or use case, including enablement of eSIM secure identification;
• Data Management – Analysis of trusted data, from individual devices to enterprise-wide big data deployments, including third-party data (works horizontally across apps and use-cases).

The Pelion IoT Platform delivers a strong combined partner ecosystem of 140+ partners spanning silicon, mobile, network operators (MNOs), channel, technology providers and more. It incorporates much of the technology that propelled Treasure Data’s cloud-based Enterprise Customer Data Platform (CDP) into the market-leading position it enjoys today. Treasure Data provides the unique ability to handle massive amount of streaming web, mobile, and IoT data. It enables their 300+ customers to work with mindboggling amounts of device data points. Today, Treasure Data’s platform handles 2 million events a second and processes hundreds of thousands of queries and 50 trillion records a day, blending that data into other existing enterprise analytics tools to unlock massive value.

There are many vertical IoT Platforms focusing on specific device classes. Some also focus on specific kinds of data insights they’ll support. There are vendor-specific platforms that seek to tie customers into specific clouds. The linking word here is ‘specific’.

The Pelion IoT Platform is different because it is a truly horizontal platform capable of managing any number or type of devices and connectivity, dealing with any type of data (internal and external) and linking to any cloud. In short, it offers the ability to tie into ‘Any device, Any data, Any cloud.’

We are bringing Treasure Data technology into the Pelion IoT Platform, but the Treasure Data Platform will also continue as a leading standalone technology service for existing and new customers. It will remain an important part of industry IoT enablement, providing the ability to harness new, complex edge and device data within a comprehensive customer profile to personalize their products and improve their experiences. Treasure Data customers will see the CDP continue to evolve. They now also have an opportunity to work with the Pelion IoT Platform.

A final thought
There are two reasons to celebrate today. First, the closure of the Treasure Data acquisition and the welcoming of new colleagues who share our vision and a similar innovation heritage. Second, the creation of the Pelion IoT Platform, which marks a crucial turning point in the evolution of IoT.

Can we give businesses the superpower of dealing with any kind of data? We think we can. The value will be experienced by our direct customers and the wider world of businesses that will benefit from IoT unlocking new insights, and those insights unlocking new value.