IBM and AT&T to Develop Internet of Things Solutions for Smarter Cities

According to a new research by Gartner, The Internet of Things (IoT), which excludes PCs, tablets and smartphones, will generate incremental revenue exceeding $300 billion in services in 2020. The services include hardware, embedded software, communications services and information services associated with the things.

IBM is investing heavily on smarter cities initiatives as part of its Intelligent Operations Center, Maximo Asset Management, and advanced analytics capabilities. The Blue Chip company is now partnering with AT&T to develop solutions that support the Internet of Things. The two companies intend to combine their analytics platforms, cloud and security technologies in order to gain more insights on data collected from machines in various industries.

The new AT&T and IBM alliance will initially focus on the creation of new solutions for municipalities and medium-sized utilities. These organizations want to integrate and analyze data that arise from the records of facilities such as transport vehicles, utility meters and security cameras and other connected devices.

The collaboration is important opportunities for urban planners to create better connected cities including better allocation and distribution of operation and maintenance resources based on information from events such as breakdowns; analysis of the movement of commuters to improve the management of traffic, parking areas, location and number of rescue forces. Urban planners can prepare better and respond to prevent or mitigate potential bottlenecks and other difficulties in the event of an emergency. It will help determine inefficient traffic movement patterns, so that public transport can be re-routed; and better allocation of public safety and emergency personnel in places where gather larger crowds.

IBM says smarter cities, cars, homes, machines and consumer devices will drive the growth of the Internet of Things along with the infrastructure that goes with them, unleashing a wave of new possibilities for data gathering, predictive analytics, and automation. The new collaboration with AT&T will offer insights from crowdsourcing, mobile applications, sensors and analytics on the cloud, enabling all organizations to better listen, respond and predict.

AT&T is bringing its M2M globally accessible network, devices and the Global Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) in order to integrate devices into a global network worldwide. These technologies are controlled by AT&T M2M platforms to collect the data in a secure mode, to organize, store and send them to applications. IBM brings to the agreement the Intelligent Operations Center, Maximo Asset Management, Advanced Analytics capabilities and the IBM Message Sight MQTT appliance, which also extends the IBM Mobile First family of solutions.

The two companies plan to help organizations build out systems that can collect data, wirelessly, from many remote end-nodes. The data can be analyzed and monitored, as well as fed to mobile devices for personnel in the field.

IDC predicts that by 2016, smart systems will count for a third of the market for embedded processors, affecting more than two thirds of its turnover. ARM’s recent The Economist report from the Economist Intelligence Unit reveals that IoT based intelligent devices connected to the Internet are expected to reach 15 billion units by 2015.

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