IoT Trends: Round of Announcements at IoT SWC

This week, the IoT Solutions World Congress took place in Barcelona. This is one of the largest IoT events during the year. Unfortunately, I did not attend this year, but it is interesting to look at the vendor announcements. It provides an interesting view of some of the key trends in IoT.

IoT Security

Without a doubt, IoT security was a hot topic for vendor announcements. The Register seems to have captured the industry sentiment with their headline about the Arm and Intel announcement. It seems Intel's Secure Device Onboard will now work with the Arm Pelion Device Management platform. Device provision is a major headache for enterprises, so this type of vendor collaboration will be useful.

Some other IoT security-related announcements:

• Comodo CA and Device Authority announce PKI certs from Comodo CA to be deployed on devices managed by Device Authority.
• Crypto Quantique announced a 'quantum-driven secure chip.' Not exactly sure what is a quantum-driven chip, but the press release definitely has the hyperbole often used in these types of announcements: ' This is the iPhone moment for the IoT security category.'
• NetFoundry is collaborating with Micron Authenta and Tata Communications to integrate their respective networking, memory, and connectivity solutions. Another example that it takes collaboration to deliver an IoT solution

IoT Edge

I was a bit surprised that there weren't more announcements about IoT at the edge. Eurotech made two announcements about collaborations with 1) Canonical, who has published a Snap for Eclipse Kura and Ubuntu being supported on Eurotech high performance embedded computers, and 2) Software AG, so Eurotech's software framework for edge computing will have out-of-the-box connectivity to Software AG Cumulocity IoT.

The EdgeX Foundry announced a marketplace for IoT developer kits. The first dev kit appears to be based on the Samsung Artik board. I am not really sure I get the need for yet another marketplace for IoT developer kits. Maybe someone will enlighten me.

Machine Learning

NXP announced a machine learning toolkit for edge computing. This is another interesting example of how more and more are being pushed to the edge. The key challenge will start to be integrating all the different toolkits that are on the edge.

Vertical Industries

DigitalGlobe, a geospatial data company, announced Sensing4Farming, a product for precision agriculture. It is interesting to see more and more products that are vertical industry specific. I definitely see this as a trend for the industry.

Disclosure: Arm is a client; Canonical has been a client