TI, Cisco extend IoT, cloud team up

Texas Instruments and Cisco Systems have declared separate efforts to expand partnerships aimed at the emerging Internet of Things. TI revealed eight IoT cloud service partners and said more are on the way, while Cisco announced a challenge for IoT startups and promised to work with the winners.

TI said it will work with 21emetry, ARM, Arrayent, Exosite, IBM, Spark, Thingsquare and Xively to provide cloud services for customers of its chips. The company said it is continuing to recruit partners in IoT cloud services.

The move highlights how quickly new providers of cloud services for IoT are coming out of the woodwork with various skill sets and offerings. The other rapidly expanding area in IoT is in design services to handle technical needs of the broad variety of market sectors looking to adopt wireless sensor networks of various kinds.

About 15 companies are now offering some sort of IoT cloud service, many of them listed online, a TI representative said.

"They offer different levels of service, application and demographic focus areas," said the TI rep. "Some have strong presence in industrial and some are more consumer focused...All of them provide Web interfaces with APIs to build cloud applications [and] some provide advanced business services as well," he added.

Separately, Cisco will pick three winners in its IoT startup challenge, who will share $250,000. The contest spans work on IoT applications, analytics, management and connectivity. Cisco will help winners develop, test and pilot new technologies and potentially partner with or invest in them. The company is taking applications April 21 through July 1.

"The Cisco Internet of Things Innovation Grand Challenge is another example of how we are partnering with the industry to fully realize the promise of the Internet of Things," said Maciej Kranz, VP of Cisco's corporate technology group.

- Rick Merritt
  EE Times