Writing for Fortune this week, Katherine Noyes has an interesting piece that looks at how ARM is looking to parlay its success in the mobile phone market into a dominant role as a supplier for the Internet of Things (IoT).
“There’s a real opportunity here,” Noyes quotes Ian Ferguson, ARM’s vice president of segment marketing saying.
AMD licenses designs to silicon makers like Qualcomm and AMD. Already, some of those designs are showing up in IoT products like fitness bands. That could expand – and mobile phones are the management interface for many IoT products, which also stokes ARM’s business.
But the company thinks the real opportunity lies in commercial technology for verticals like infrastructure (smart cities), manufacturing and oil and gas exploration. “You’ve got highly valued assets, so preventative mechanical services can help improve efficiency by detecting problems before they break down,” Ferguson said.
ARM acquired Sensinode Oy in August, 2013. Sensinode pioneered software and software standards for low-power devices used in everything from mobile phones and tablets to wearable computing. Sensinode gave ARM technology that allows programmers to more easily develop software applications that run on low power devices and that are compliant with standards like the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP). The company has folded that into its own
Some experts see ARM as well-positioned to dominate the market for IoT, occupying a role similar to the one Intel played during the PC era: a predictable foundation on top of which others could develop products and services.
Read the full story here: With phones in its pocket, ARM eyes the Internet of Things.
