IBM is to create a worldwide group of 2,500 developers to help partners and customers “collect, analyse and act upon entirely new forms of IoT data”.
The firm said the development team is in response to the proliferation of automobile and airplane telematics, building and environmental sensors, wearable devices, medical implants, weather stations, smartphones, social media, manufacturing lines and supply chains, among others.
Big Blue will create the resource for IoT implementations as the firm closed its acquisition of The Weather Company’s websites and technology platform. This platform will be used to underline IBM’s IoT offerings.
“The Weather Company’s dynamic cloud data platform, which powers the fourth most-used mobile app daily in the United States and handles up to 26 billion inquiries to its cloud-based services each day, will run across IBM Cloud data centres globally and serve as the technology backbone of IBM’s data services and Watson IoT businesses,” IBM said in a statement.
“By leveraging one of the world’s most scalable, high performance and flexible data platforms, IBM can now collect an even larger variety and higher velocity of data sets from billions of IoT sensors around the world while also serving out real-time information and insights to tens of millions of users worldwide.
IBM Watson IoT
“The new platform offers developers greater flexibility to access, store and analyse IoT sensor data and to create new apps with richer and deeper insights powered by IBM Watson.”
Fred de Haro, CEO of IoT start up Pycom, told Internet of Business that IBM’s acquisition of The Weather Channel may have been driven by the fact that the site typically receives seven times the volume of data queries compared to the world’s leading search engine.
“However, the company’s subsequent decision to put in place a development team of 2,500 developers would confirm IBM’s intent to leverage the platform and location specific data generated as a result of such queries,” he said.
“Adding context to a query will allow companies with IoT deployments to optimise device behaviour and performance. IoT verticals where context queries can optimise performance are likely to be positively impacted by IBM’s actions, areas such as automotive aerospace, HVAC, social media, etc.
“Whilst the first stage of IoT growth may have focused on deployment and reliability of devices, the next phase must focus on optimisation of these assets.”
IBM announced the launch of its Watson IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany in December last year.