Well, the answer is simple – it’s another IoT platform and this one is developed by IBM. As you can read in our earlier post Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IIoT Platforms in 2018 – IBM is in Niche Players Quadrant, but very close to Visionaries Quadrant. Recent IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat for 34 billion USD will definitely help them in getting there and share the same Gartner’s Magic Quadrant with PTC, SAP and Hitachi. Red Hat will help IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Division for better positioning in cloud market and through OpenStack virtualization portfolio they will have a strong entry in enterprise IoT device management and edge computing. As you have notice there’s a zillion of IoT platforms and definitely all of them will not survive and you don’t want to end up with solution from the vendor that has failed, you don’t want end up with a solution that stopped its further development – you need to have a long term strategy. IBM is definitely one of the names that will survive, so I see them as a good choice for building future-proof IoT solution. Those were the reasons why I decided to explore the Watson IoT Platform and see what’s it all about.
So, this is managed, cloud-hosted service that captures data in a real time and spots the trends on time, so you’d be able to optimize your operations and
resources. This new point of view will help you help you increase revenue, introduce new products and services. Then there’s: Analytic service add-on, that will will explore IoT data, discover some valuable insights and create meaningful business KPIs, and Blockchain service add-on, that will be useful for tracking, traceability, smart contracts, etc. Also, there’s advanced security control, support for high data volumes and availability.
IBM is offering Watson IoT Platform Developer Center where you can try Watson IBM platform on IBM Cloud, but you can also play with Watson IoT platform in this interactive demo. Most importantly you can learn a lot from available blog posts, webinars, hands-on videos, Coursera courses, as well as articles and tutorials in Technical Library.
Watson IoT Platform is supported by a large ecosystem of IBM business partners.
Who is actually using Watson IoT Platform? Fully managed aaS platform is used in manufacturing, processing, facility management, transport, power generation and transmission, construction, mining, retail, shipping – and IBM’s goal is to create the best IIoT platform.
At the end, I’d emphasize once again that Watson IBM platform is definitely future-proof and that there’s a lot of available data to get familiar with it, try it and than decide if it’s a right fit for your needs.