Smartphone vendor BlackBerry announced its Internet of Things initiative codenamed Project Ion.
Announced at the O’Reilly Solid Conference (May 21-22, San Francisco), BlackBerry said the Project Ion will be the cornerstone of BlackBerry’s vision to offer end-to-end solutions for the Internet of Things for the enterprises market.
IoT is gaining momentum. Recently, enterprise IT vendor Cisco announced plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud for the Internet of Everything (IoE) together with a set of partners, a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads and real-time analytics.
In addition, Cisco also selected Toronto as the location for one of four global Cisco Internet of Everything innovation centers. Cisco will invest up to $100 million over 10 years in Toronto as part of its IoT program.
The leading tier of M2M (IoT) players have committed meaningful resources to developing their M2M businesses and now have significant scale to show for it – between 2 million to just under 10 million M2M connections, said Infonetics Research.
“They have strategies in place and have created standalone M2M business units comprised of overlay go-to-market and technical organizations. M2M is no longer just an extension of the enterprise business unit for these service providers,” said Godfrey Chua, directing analyst for M2M and The Internet of Things at Infonetics Research.
An Infonetics survey said for many service providers entering the M2M space, a service platform is key to jump-starting an M2M business: Those surveyed most often named Jasper Wireless and Ericsson as the top M2M platform providers. Meanwhile, 55 percent of respondents are using internally-developed M2M service platforms.
BlackBerry will announce a secure public application platform that will enable IoT applications that can access data from multiple sources and allow businesses to make informed decisions. Powered by QNX technology and BlackBerry secure enterprise mobility management, this platform will manage data from end points across multi-device, multi-platform environments.
The company ensures the facilitation of an IoT ecosystem including partners, carriers and application developers to connect an ever-growing number of Internet-enabled devices on a public applications platform.
John Chen, executive chairman and CEO, BlackBerry, said: “Billions of connections, generating trillions of transactions and exabytes of data daily, will require platforms that can operate securely on a global scale.”
Project Ion will offer the resources necessary to access data from multiple disparate sources and distill it into actionable information using open source and third party analytic tools.
“The IoT is redrawing the lines of IT responsibilities for the enterprise. Securing the IoT expands the responsibility of the IT security practice with every new identifying, sensing and communicating device that is added for each new business use case,” said Earl Perkins, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner earlier predicted that IoT security requirements will reshape and expand over half of all global enterprise IT security programs by 2020 due to changes in supported platform and service scale, diversity and function.
Baburajan K
