IBM To Invest $3 Billion To Start New IoT Business Unit

IBM will invest $3 billion over the next four years to establish a new IoT business unit, including building a cloud-based open platform “designed to help clients and ecosystem partners build IoT solutions,” the company said in a Tuesday announcement. The open platform will give manufacturers “the ability to design and produce a new generation of connected devices that are better optimized for the IoT, and to help business leaders across industries create systems that better fuse enterprise and IoT data to inform decision-making,” IBM said. IBM estimates 90 percent of all data generated by smartphones, tablets, connected vehicles and appliances “is never analyzed or acted on,” the company said. “As much as 60 percent of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated.” To address that challenge, IBM’s open platform “will provide new analytics services that clients, partners and IBM will use to design and deliver vertical industry IoT solutions,” the company said.