IBM is expanding its Internet of Things (IoT) platform – called IBM IoT Foundation - through an integration with ARM, providing out of the box connectivity with ARM mbed-enabled devices to analytics services. This fusion will allow huge quantities of data from devices such as industrial appliances to be gathered, analyzed and acted upon.

IBM also announced the first in a series of IBM Cloud-based, industry-specific IoT services with IoT for Electronics. The service will enable electronics manufacturers to gather data from individual sensors that can be combined with other data for real-time analysis.

The IBM IoT Foundation is a platform upon which a family of fully managed, cloud-hosted offerings on the SoftLayer Infrastructure is built. IoT Foundation makes it simple to derive value from Internet of Things (IoT) devices. It includes:

Analytics tools capable of dealing with large quantities of fast-moving data,
Access to IBM Bluemix, IBM’s Platform-as-a-Service, that is capable of handling the immense flow of data and provide anytime access for decision makers; and Security systems capable of helping organizations protect IoT data as rigorously as they do their own confidential financial, IP and strategy information.

The integration between IBM and ARM will allow products powered by ARM mbed-enabled chips to automatically register with the IBM IoT Foundation, and connect with IBM analytics services. This unifies the ARM mbed IoT Device Platform and the IBM IoT Foundation at the point where information gathered from deployed sensors in any connected device is delivered to the cloud for analysis. The IoT connection also enables delivery of actionable events to control equipment or provide users with alerts or other information. For example, the triggering of an alarm message on a washing machine to ask the owner to confirm a breakdown engineer appointment if a fault is detected.