About a year after officially launching its Internet of Things business unit, Intel (News - Alert) is working hard to define its strategy and get IoT technology into the hands of consumers. A key piece of that initiative will be a smoothing of the road for developers, who are interested in creative apps aimed at leveraging everything from connected cars to hamster cages with the ability to talk to the Internet.
Speaking to an audience at a San Francisco media event last week, Intel executives reported that the IoT unit is on track to reach $2 billion a year in revenue, with a healthy 18 percent annual growth. And according to Mike Bell (News - Alert), vice president and general manager of new devices for Intel, the number of objects embedded with semiconductors will continue to grow exponentially, making for a fertile field for the world’s largest chipmaker. Its internal IoT forecast calls for 40 billion connected things by 2020, from wearables to machine-to-machine gateways for industrial implementations.
However, a few factors need to fall into place to truly kick-start the market opportunity. For one, a large amount of device fragmentation has made it more difficult and expensive for developers to write relevant, monetizable applications that can wrap in a variety of endpoints. For another, all of that data in the cloud that will stem from these billions of devices can be a rich repository for strategic insights into customers and business strategy—or it can be a security nightmare and management headache.
Looking to address these concerns, Intel has debuted a platform aimed at developers looking to build in security for their applications, and harness cloud-based big data with analytics and reporting.
“We needed a repeatable foundation to help customers deploy solutions,” said Doug Davis, vice president and general manager of Intel IoT, speaking to Forbes. “We’re unifying the building blocks into a single platform.”
Aside from the comparatively mature markets of energy management, home automation and connected cars, developers have faced big obstacles when it comes to making IoT technology accessible for the average user, across a range of devices. In many ways, the usability of the operating system for writing apps, and the elegance of the user interface, are the two biggest areas that need work.
Davis compared it to the early days of the PC. “There were a number of things that happened that made PCs scalable — processor capability tied with the operating system,” Davis said. “We’re talking about delivering the operating system for endpoint devices.”
Intel also talked up its ecosystem: it acquired API developers Aepona and Mashery (News - Alert).com as the kernels of the IoT division, to provide monetization and traffic management, respectively. Also, the division which also incorporates the brain trust from Intel Labs, the Intel New Devices Group, McAfee (News - Alert) security and other business units, and device and data management from Wind River.