Guess Who Is Paving The Way in the Current IoT Market? - Part 2
An awful din is seen in the IoT market these days where everyone claims to be winning, leading or pioneering. But do you know who’s actually winning? Now IoT being a homogenous marketplace cannot have one single player to rule all.
This article is a continuation of Guess Who Succeeds in Paving a New Way in the Current IOT Market? - Part 1.
Google
Google, a company that has succeeded in creating a solid footing in the consumer market and cloud. With its flagship Android platform, the company has succeeded in acquiring a huge developer community, especially during the past five years. There is no doubt in the fact that Google’s smartest move came in the form of Android. There was a time when the company was considered as a search engine company today transformed into a giant consumer entity overnight. Though having limited success with Chromebooks, Android became its entry ticket to the IoT party. Other than phones, Android powers wearables, automobiles, TVs and set-up boxes.
Previous year, Google acquired Nest, a home automation company located in Palo Alto co-founded by former Apple engineers Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers. Apart from that, Brillo, an IoT operating system was announced last week. Expected to be launched at Google I/O, the tiny OS is designed with a sole purpose to power smart locks and sensor nodes.
In addition to all this, it may quite interest you to know that Google is considered as one of the top cloud infrastructure providers. Their deep expertise to manage large data centers enables the company to open some interesting range of internal tools to developers. For instance, App engine and cloud compute engine handles the computer part while cloud storage and Bigtable expose scalable storage. Other services such as Cloud Pub/ Sub, Cloud Dataflow, and BigQuery provide the ingestion, event processing, and analytics. A real-time data synchronization platform named FireBase makes things easy especially in terms of maintenance and sync data across multiple ranges of devices.
Core Strengths - Android platform, wearables, Nest, active developer community, self-driven auto platform, and Google Cloud Platform
Microsoft
One of the few companies with vested interest in end-user computing and cloud computing, Microsoft is logically positioned to exploit the IoT opportunity. In the year 2015, Microsoft shared its vision of running Windows 10 on 1 billion devices. Other than desktops, phones, and tablets, clients can now include sensor nodes, development boards, gateways and embedded devices. Now developers will be able to make use of familiar programming model across all available devices. It may even interest you to know that with Windows IoT core, Microsoft has started targeting the maker community.
Apart from this, the company is currently working on a wearable platform that will not only work with Windows but also with Android and IOS. Microsoft Band, the fitness tracking device is up for a major revamp. The other side of Microsoft’s IoT story takes us to the cloud. Azure has come a long way since its initial launch in 2010. And with each and every new service release and feature update, it is inching close to AWS. Microsoft Azure has all the right components to support IoT solutions.
Core Strengths - Windows and .NET platform, unified programming model, developer adoption, Xbox and Kinect, and Azure
Samsung
Featuring the flagship smartphone brand, Galaxy, and a feature-rich smart TV platform, Samsung is the company to keep a close eye on in the IoT segment. With the support of Android, the company has been working an operating system called Tizen that powers an array of wearable platforms, Galaxy Gears. Developed in association with the Linux Foundation and Intel, the system is designed to power smartphones, tablets, in-vehicle infotainment devices, smart TVs, smart appliances, smart cameras, and wearable computing. Going forward, this OS may power Samsung’s smart appliances and devices.
At the recent Iot world event, Samsung unveiled ARKIT, an embedded platform which can be used to build IoT devices. The platform available in three configurations features a variety a variety of hardware modules, software, and services with connectivity options based on WiFi, Bluetooth, and ZigBee. Furthermore, the platform even incorporates Samsung’s Secure Element, a cryptographic hardware security mechanism designed to prevent unauthorized access.
If you remember in August 2014, the company acquired SmartThings, an open platform for smart home devices. The project eventually created a tool to let people monitor and control their devices through a mobile application. And gradually added partners such as Belkin, Sonos, and Philips to support more than 1,000 devices and 8,000 application. In comparison to others, Samsung is less experienced when it comes to managing cloud infrastructure.
Core Strengths - Galaxy brand value, wearables, Smart TVs, Tizen, ARTIK, and SmartThings
Final Verdict
These are some of the well-known firms with the potential of making it big in the consumer IoT market and have the ability to cover the whole spectrum. In order to succeed, two factors must be taken into consideration- Strong presence in the consumer segment and scalable infrastructure to support the growth.