Editor’s note: John Spooner is Director, Internet of Things (IoT) and Devices Practice at research firm Technology Business Research.

HAMPTON, N.H. – Intel continues to expand its Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem, with the aim of powering the broadest possible range of customers’ IoT solutions.

The chipmaker is promoting real-world improvements created by a new lineup of Quark chips, Wind River operating systems, and cloud-based app development and device management tools to complement Atom and its system-on-a-chip offerings, such as Edison and Curie.

It created the reference architecture, or blueprint, which it calls the Intel IoT Platform, to provide developers with building blocks that make it faster and easier to create new IoT products and services.

Developers can now provide their own customers with products and services that improve their day-to-day lives, such as increasing safety for first responders or providing deeper insight into product inventory for businesses.

Intel IoT Platform embodies Intel’s effort to grow IoT revenue by providing chips, software and cloud-based IoT building blocks to OEM, systems integrator (SI) and developer customers. Intel IoT Platform announcement, which details the chipmaker’s IoT plans through 2016, reflects a tactical step in its broader strategic plan to grow revenue by tapping opportunities outside of PCs and traditional IT infrastructure. Intel’s goal is to streamline the process of creating products in three adjacent areas: IoT solutions, which are largely business-oriented; connected devices, which are consumer- and business-oriented; and robotics.

Under this plan, unveiled at its Intel Developer Forum in May, the chipmaker provides developers and SIs the underlying hardware, software and programming tools they need to create their products. By simplifying and standardizing this process for IoT, Intel enables its customers to focus on creating their unique products or services features and capabilities.

Rather than expending resources to build every aspect of an IoT product, Intel allows developers to focus on crafting the portion that interfaces with customers — typically, applications software — taking on the underlying hardware, application development environment, and back-end device and application connectivity via its hosting capabilities.

Intel’s investments in IoT are necessary, as nearly 90% of its revenue comes from mature businesses, including its Client Computing Group, which caters to PCs and tablets, and its Data Center Group, which caters to servers, networking and storage.

Together, the two groups accounted for 87.4% of 3Q15 revenue, according to TBR’s 3Q15 Intel report. TBR estimates Intel’s IoT business is on pace to deliver approximately $2.6 billion in revenue annually and has been growing at between 10% and 20% year-to-year.

Intel’s message: Leave the hardware to us

The key to Intel’s success in IoT is providing a customizable platform that delivers the basic IoT requirements of capturing, delivering and analyzing the data customers need in their specific use cases. By providing broad capabilities and flexible interfaces for programming, Intel enables its customers — the developers or SIs — to customize their products to their end customers’ intended outcomes. In this scenario Intel wins by selling chips by the truckload as well as services that assist developers in creating their solutions.

Although this process is fundamentally the same as helping to evolve PCs, phone or tablets, Intel faces far greater numbers of potential customers. Therefore, Intel has become more flexible in providing its silicon and software building blocks to enable new products. The company has also shifted its go to market from focusing on end customers with its Intel Inside campaign to courting developers more intently.

TBR expects Intel to continue the campaign, yet apply it more generally to Intel technology, especially wearables and other consumer-focused elements. Intel has decades of experience working with partners to incorporate its technologies into PCs. Its foray into IoT carries greater risk in that it is reflective of a broader, more developer-focused approach.

The company is investing heavily to court a broad array of developers and SIs. However, Intel is, by nature, an ecosystem builder. The company has taken numerous steps to build its IoT ecosystem.

Among them, it created a commercial IoT development kit, a starter kit with a development board, cables, and built-in connections to developer cloud and commercial cloud services. The kit, based on a consumerdevices-oriented offering, will be available in January for commercial developers.

The company dedicated a segment of its Intel developer zone, a population of 15 million developers, to IoT. To date, it has 400,000 participating developers, almost double the number it hosted in May. The chipmaker is also engaging with approximately 120 universities and is holding events to drive innovation, which creates a pipeline of ideas and capabilities that flows into new products. The company will incorporate a broad range of capabilities into its chips, including pattern matching, which enables its forthcoming Quark SE microcontroller to learn and generate responses when patterns fall out of the norm, support for numerous sensor types, and the ability to take advantage of hardware and software security features.

The forthcoming Quark SE microcontroller’s internal sensor hub and pattern matching technology enable developers to program it to recognize patterns and trigger behaviors based on those patterns. For example, the chip could be part of a smart module that can measure vibration patterns within an industrial pump. This on-chip capability would enable the creation of equipment that performs ongoing monitoring and conducts early diagnosis of specific problems, leveraging its onboard intelligence with complementary edge processing. The equipment would monitor and log continuously, but might only report critical issues, avoiding outright failures.

The chipmaker’s Quark microcontrollers support numerous operating systems from its Wind River subsidiary, including Wind River Rocket and Wind River Pulsar Linux. Rocket is a free real-time operating system designed for applications such as sensor hubs, wearables and edge devices.

Pulsar is a binary Linux operating system designed to run on applications scaling from 32-bit microcontrollers to 64-bit CPUs. Both connect with Wind River’s Helix Cloud SaaS products. Helix Cloud includes App Cloud, Lab Cloud and Device Cloud, and is used for IoT app development, device testing and device management. Device Cloud, for example, delivers device management that enables sensor and device connections and management. Helix Cloud’s focus on apps and devices allows developers to work with additional partners, such as Microsoft, for cloud-based data storage and analytics. Build it and they will come Intel showcased a broad range of solutions being built and tested by its partners and their customers.

The chipmaker’s proof-of-concept demonstrations included Honeywell and Levi Strauss. Each uses Intel IoT technologies to address the specific needs of its customers. Honeywell is using Intel technology to help emergency management improve first responders’ effectiveness and safety, while Levi Strauss is using the same components to better manage inventory at its retail stores. Although immensely different, the two examples show how IoT technologies — and Intel ones, specifically — can provide better visibility into the specific functions their adopters require. Where a fire chief would gain vision to make better decisions and keep firefighters safer, a store manager would be able to ensure customers do not leave empty-handed.

Both scenarios are critical to the success of their respective proprietors.

Levi Strauss showed how an Intel-based solution, implemented by a retail SI partner, enables Levi Strauss to track the entire inventory in its flagship store in real time. Understanding inventory in real time gives insights into current and near-future sales and customer trends as well as ensures Levi Strauss has shelves stocked adequately, such that customers do not simply walk away. Honeywell is using Intel chips to help better inform first responders of ongoing situations. For example, a fire chief can better oversee a deployment of firefighters within a burning building, including understanding their relative positions, vital signs and the environmental conditions within the direct space they are in by placing Intel-based wearable devices in their gear.

Small chips doing big things Intel’s IoT efforts are broader-based than that of its PC and mobile or data center arms out of necessity. To succeed in IoT, Intel is working to attract hordes of developers, ISVs and SIs to build the solutions necessary to broadly deploy Intel silicon, OS and cloud-based services. The chipmaker is not only supporting Wind River OSes; it will also support Google’s Brillo operating system for IoT devices, among others.

By enabling the devices and their respective connections, Intel seeks to help rewire the way businesses manage their operations and their customers and invent new businesses. It does so atop Intel silicon, in sensors and devices, as well as data centers and massive cloud-based IoT platforms. Intel’s vested interest in IoT comes as its PC business is flagging, its data center business is growing slowly and its mobile business remains a work in progress.

According to TBR’s 3Q15 Intel report, weak demand in PCs prompted a quarterly revenue decline of 0.6% year-to-year to $14.5 billion in 3Q15, marking Intel’s second consecutive quarter of year-to-year revenue decline. Yet the speed with which Intel’s IoT business accelerates will be determined by the value it brings to developers and developers’ ability to deliver value to their end customer, as well as the length of the cycle from idea to proposal to commitment to execution to deployment. The company is participating in numerous proof-of-concept www.tbri.com TBR designs outside of Honeywell and Levi Strauss.

For example, Intel partner Dell has said it has well over 100 IoT proof of concepts in the works, many of which incorporate a Dell Gateway device, based on Intel chips. TBR forecasts the commercial IoT infrastructure market will grow over 20% between 2015 and 2020, creating tens of billions in incremental revenue, a portion of which will go to Intel, thanks to its IoT platform and product offerings around IoT devices, such as gateways and supporting server, storage and networking infrastructure.

Event overview

Intel IoT Insights 2015, a small and exclusive event in San Francisco earlier this month included a general session along with specific use-case-focused breakouts and one-on-one meetings for analyst and media, customer and partner attendees to show the details behind Intel’s 2016 IoT road map and portfolio plan. Speakers included Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO; Diane Bryant, vice president of Data Center Group; Doug Davis, vice president of IoT Group; Doug Fisher, vice president of Software Group; and Josh Walden, vice president of New Technology Group.

(C) TBR

Technology Business Research, Inc. is a leading independent technology market research and consulting firm specializing in the business and financial analyses of hardware, software, professional services, and telecom vendors and operators. Serving a global clientele, TBR provides timely and actionable market research and business intelligence in a format that is uniquely tailored to clients’ needs. Our analysts are available to address client-specific issues further or information needs on an inquiry or proprietary consulting basis. TBR has been empowering corporate decision makers since 1996.

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