One of the biggest problems plaguing the IoT (Internet of Things) market today is fragmentation, and Samsung says its new ARTIK Cloud service is geared toward solving that problem, rather than creating a walled garden around its own products, as InformationWeek reports:
At the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, the company introduced the Samsung ARTIK Cloud, a cloud-based backend design to run IoT applications and services.
"Our motto is 'make connections, not silos,'" said Curtis Sasaki, VP of ecosystems and IoT general manager at Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center.
ARTIK Cloud represents an effort to allow the notoriously fragmented set of IoT devices work together. Sasaki suggested it could help IoT mean "the interoperability of things."
The platform is open in the sense that it can communicate with devices from a variety of vendors through protocols like REST/HTTP, Websockets, MQTT, and CoAP. It's supported by an assortment of tools and services, including a new ARTIK IDE (to write device code), resin.io (for automatic device updating), a Rules Engine (for crafting conditional actions), and eyeSight Technologies' computer vision capabilities. Partners like Legrand and Digibe Software provide paths to connect enterprise systems.
The new cloud service will complement the rest of Samsung's hardware and software products, which includes developer boards for creating "gadgets, drones, robots, wearables and home and industrial automation products," as Computerworld notes.
Analysis: ARTIK Cloud Enters A Crowded IoT Market
"We see the importance of platforms for all high tech companies," says Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller. "Samsung is not only a device maker but it needs to involve into a platform for next-generation applications. It needs an ecosystem for software vendors to create applications that use Samsung and other devices. It is good to see that Samsung is keeping ARTIK open from the start. That's the right and only way to achieve success in IoT."
A wide variety of players from software vendors to device makers and telcos are jockeying to carve out their piece of the rapidly growing IoT pie, notes Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Guy-Frederic Courtin. "It makes a lot of sense for companies like Samsung, who have a network already through their hardware products," he says.
The proliferation of IoT platforms ideally will drive interest among vendors in cooperating on standard protocols. "My sense is that we're going to have standards based on verticals," Courtin says. "There will be one standard for connected cars, one for connected kitchens, one for wearables and so forth."
In the meantime, enterprise customers need to start mapping out an IoT strategy, with the first step being to improve an existing business process and get more out of infrastructure and assets they already have.
For example, a rental car company could place sensors in their vehicles that track how customers are driving and treating the vehicle, Courtin says. Then they could offer discounted rates to good, safe drivers and non-preferred rates for more aggressive ones. Obviously, such a concept would have to overcome customer privacy concerns, but if successful it could both extract more incremental revenue from the company's fleet while changing customers' driving habits, Courtin says.
"Wake up, IoT is here," Courtin says. "The genie is out of the bottle and you need to start thinking about it."
Download an excerpt of Courtin's in-depth report, The Five Interconnected Internet of Things Business Models, at this link.
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