The Internet of Things (IoT ) continues its inexorable race to the finish. Now AT&T and IBM (IBM) have announced they are working together to help businesses accelerate IoT.
“The two companies will combine their unique strengths in cognitive computing and global connectivity to create open standards-based tools on the IBM Cloud to enable developers to more quickly build and implement a wide variety of IoT solutions,” a company statement explains.
The open standards-based tools allow developers to improve their skills and avoid the churn of learning new tools, which helps protect the investments businesses have made in IoT solution development.
“As demand for IoT solutions grows, so does the demand for skilled IoT developers,” notes the statement, citing insight from the VisionMobile 2016 Internet of Things Megatrends report, which suggests that nearly 10 million developers will be active in IoT by 2020.
Consequently, IBM and AT&T have decided to put their full commitment and investment in open-source based tools, such as Node-Red, and open standards like MQTT, all essential for creating IoT solutions.
Developers can now add the power of IBM’s Watson cognitive computing and AT&T’s IoT Platforms like Flow Designer and M2X, and access to its global network.
This combination of open standards and IBM’s and AT&T’s unique technologies will result in a new level of IoT possibilities and solutions for developers to leverage well into the future,.
“We have heard the call from developers and businesses for more tools to make IoT a reality and together with AT&T, we are bringing together powerful platforms and services to drive collaborative innovation,” said Harriet Green, general manager, IBM Watson IoT, Commerce & Education. “This collaboration enables individual developers to tap the power of cognitive computing and combine it with massive amounts of data streaming from billions of connected devices, sensors and systems to create solutions that can help transform businesses and society alike.”
AT&T is also working with IBM on a new starter kit to make it easier for developers to get going. Once completed, customers will be able to purchase the combined AT&T and IBM technologies in one toolkit for a complete set of IoT tools to start their IoT projects right away.
More information on the IBM Watson IoT Platform is available here.