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August 2, 2018

Arm Adds Data Management to its IoT Platform

(BeeBright/Shutterstock)

Arm Ltd. is adding data management to its Internet of Things device and connectivity frameworks with the launch of a platform geared to sensor network diversity and hybrid infrastructure.

Separately, the U.K. chip maker confirmed its acquisition of enterprise data management specialist Treasure Data. Terms were not disclosed, but Arm said the acquisition is its largest ever cash deal. The website Crunchbase.com pegged the deal at $600 million.

Dipesh Patel, president of Arm’s IoT Services Group, said Treasure Data management platform represents “the final piece of our IoT enablement puzzle.” The acquisition along with this week’s introduction of its latest IoT platform dubbed Pelion adds a data management capability to its earlier IoT connectivity and device management frameworks.

The Pelion “device-to-data” IoT platform also targets hybrid infrastructure as enterprises confront IoT complexity, device “fragmentation” and the need for data management as they combine raw sensor, enterprise and industrial data into trillions of data streams. “Device and operational complexity are the greatest inhibitors to IoT scaling,” Patel said Thursday (Aug. 2) during a company briefing.

The data management services announced this week would help ingest and prepare IoT data for analysis, generating what the company called a “supply of usable IoT data.” The “horizontal” platform is billed as managing myriad IoT devices and networking schemes along with external sensor and internal customer data. These data sets could then be linked to public or private clouds along with on-premises infrastructure.

That approach, Arm said, differs from “vertical” IoT platforms focused on specific classes of devices that connect users to a specific cloud. By contrast, Arm said its approach ties any device or data type to a preferred cloud. The hybrid infrastructure approach is designed to handle the growing diversity of IoT devices and data, Patel said.

Meanwhile, Arm cited Treasure Data’s expertise in aggregating and translating huge volumes of scattered data, including sensor data from IoT devices, on the order of 2 million events per second. Joyce Kim, Arm’s chief marketing officer, said it would continue to emphasize synergies between customer and device data as the company integrates Treasure Data’s data management tools into its Pelion platform.

The data management capability will be combined with earlier technology acquisitions, including the June acquisition of IoT connectivity specialist Stream Technologies and Arm’s in-house Mbed Cloud.

Patel said the Pelion IoT platform would be offered under a software services subscription model.

The acquisition binge reflects Arm’s conviction that the estimated 1 trillion IoT devices to be linked by 2025 “is really about data,” Kim said. Hence, data management capabilities are in greater demand as enterprises seek to break up data silos and improve data preparation.

The SoftBank (TYO: 9984) unit is positioning Pelion’s data management layer as supplying “trusted data” for a range of use cases along with “usable” IoT data for enterprise analytics. Given its heavy emphasis on IoT data management, Kim did not rule out a future Arm foray into data analytics.

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