IBM, AT&T partner on Internet of Things to make cities smarter

Enterprise IT giant IBM and US carrier AT&T announced a partnership Wednesday that will see the two companies co-develop cloud and analytics solutions that ingest data from M2M sensors embedded in civil and energy infrastructure in cities. The companies said they will combine analytics, cloud and security technologies in a bid to capitalise on the burgeoning Internet of Things movement.

The partnership will initially focus on co-developing solutions for city governments and midsize utilities, which will gather data from sensors embedded in everything from transit vehicles and traffic lights to video cameras and utility meters.

The companies said the new platform will help improve urban planning and allow cities to improve resource allocation across metropolitan environments by analysing the movement of people, improving traffic and parking capacity as well the response times of first responders in the event of emergencies.

“Smarter cities, cars, homes, machines and consumer devices will drive the growth of the Internet of Things along with the infrastructure that goes with them, unleashing a wave of new possibilities for data gathering, predictive analytics, and automation,” said Rick Qualman, vice president, strategy & business development, telecom industry, IBM.

AT&T said the resulting technologies will be managed through its existing M2M platform, with IBM contributing its Intelligent Operations Centre, the dashboard utility for its Smarter Cities portfolio, and its analytics and cloud technologies.

“The new collaboration with AT&T will offer insights from crowdsourcing, mobile applications, sensors and analytics on the cloud, enabling all organizations to better listen, respond and predict,” Qualman added.

While IBM has been working steadily on its Smarter Cities portfolio AT&T, a longtime partner of the enterprise IT incumbent, has over the past few years moved to expand its reach in the growing M2M space.

Last year the telco partnered with Indian IT and outsourcing company Wipro to build its M2M application development platform, and it launched a range of M2M “Foundry” innovation centres last summer to speed up development. It also recently unveiled a modular connected car platform based on Ericsson’s vehicle cloud technology.

That said, both AT&T and IBM see a huge opportunity in the M2M space. According to IDC the installed base for the Internet of Things will grow to approximately 30 billion connected devices by 2020.

This article originally appeared on Business Cloud News.