BERLIN – IBM IBM -2.10% made a splash in the news last February when it announced a partnership with with British chip maker ARM for the launch of the “ARM mbed IoT Starter Kit“. which allowed entrepreneurs and small businesses to easily and affordably access the fully managed, cloud-hosted service of the IBM IoT Foundation.
And even more in March, when it said it was going to bet $3 Billion On Internet Of Things opportunity, to help entrepreneurs connect their devices between themselves, and to the Internet.
Now the company is taking things a little bit further: as it announced during the IFA, the consumer electronics fair currently taking place in Berlin, it will supply users of ARM mbed-enabled devices not only with the connectivity, but also with access to data analytics services as well.
This fusion will allow huge quantities of data from devices such as industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring devices to be gathered, analyzed and acted upon, and will be run on a subscription model.

Employees work at the International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) Watson headquarters during an event in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2014. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
Other services provided by the company will be related to risk management, which means in this case both securing the flow of information in ways that are most suitable to the specific industries involved (the way you may want to secure your connected appliances infrastructure could be very different to what you’ll need in the case, say, of a connected car), and proactively spotting potential issues that could compromise the efficiency of the IoT infrastructure.
The IoT connection provided by IBM through its Bluemix platform, will also enable the 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.
The company also announced the first of a series of industry specific solutions: it will address the needs of electronics manufacturers, with a pre-tailored configuration.
“What we want to get to,” IBM’s Director for IoT Connectivity and ecosystem, Neil Postlethwaite tells me, “is a consistent view from cloud down to device, from a programming perspective and from a device management perspective.”