Step aside small fries, it’s time for the big players to get it done. With its acquisition of Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) in January, and the closing last week of its purchase of Smart Health device company Withings, Nokia (News - Alert) is making no bones about its buy-in to the IoT. And, in an IoT Evolution exclusive episode of the IoT Time Podcast, we sat down and talked to Frank Ploumen, Director, IoT Platform product strategy, Nokia, about the company’s new IoT platform offering, the Intelligent Management Platform for All Connected Things, or IMPACT.
IMPACT is designed to be a secure, powerful platform which can link about 80,000 types of edge devices (and it’s got an SDK for new ones as they are developed) to any analytics engine or dashboard. Nokia said that service providers, enterprises and governments will get on board with the platform if they want a secure, application-independent IoT platform that will help them quickly bring services to market.
“Most platforms…are application enablement platforms,” Ploumen said. “They make it very easy for people, once you have data to actually do something with that data. Underneath this type of application-enablement platform, and this is where IMPACT is really focusing, there’s a number of basic questions dealing with how to manage connectivity, provisioning of devices, managing rate plans, managing the devices themselves. IMPACT is much more geared to those enabling functions.”
The product as it is available now includes Motive Connected Device Platform, the integrated assets from Nokia’s recent acquisitions, an IoT services practice with specialties in data analytics and security and new IoT devices and gateways. The full IMPACT platform will handle data collection, event processing, device management, data contextualization, data analytics, end-to-end security and applications enablement, for any device, any protocol, and across any application, according to the company.
Some key elements of the IMPACT ecosystem will be customized vertical solutions for connected cars, healthcare, first responders, smart cities, smart homes, and utility deployments. Nokia will also sponsor a new IoT Community, which will operate with the aim of helping customers develop, test, and implement new IoT business models.
CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO KEN’S DISCUSSION WITH PLOUMEN ABOUT THE IMPACT ANNOUNCEMENT
“All IoT solutions…they have a few things in common, in the sense that they all use similar building blocks, and the building blocks that we see are devices or sensors, connectivity networks, we see some form of a platform and then we see applications to make sense out of the data,” Ploumen said. “Now, what IMPACT is focused on is making sure we solve generic problems only once. So, rather than create a whole bunch of point solutions… it’s trying to deal with how to get a secure connection with a device, how do I build a two-way authentication between the device and the network, only once. So that any application that wants to take advantage of the data can do so without having to reinvent the wheel. So, in a nutshell, that’s what IMPACT is about.”
For a look at some of the other leading platform solutions in the IoT, make sure you attend the IoT Evolution Expo Battle of the Platforms, where we pit the leading platform companies against one another to see which one has the chops to be the best in the IoT. Think you’ve got the juice? Then register now to get your 10 minutes on the stage. Let the Battle begin.