Google moves to claim a bigger piece of the IoT pie

Internet giant Google has launched Cloud IoT Core, a new service in its Google Cloud Platform designed to extend its capabilities to distributed devices.

The launch serves as a reminder of what a potentially strong position Google is in when it comes to the nascent IoT industry. It already oversees billions of devices via Android and is a pioneer in the consumer cloud. While its B2B cloud efforts maybe play second fiddle to AWS, it’s hard to question Google’s credentials at either end of the IoT food chain. What remains to be seen is what Google decides to do about the bit in between – connectivity.

In a blog post stating the case for the new service Google’s Indranil Chakraborty claimed Cloud IoT core solves several current IoT problems, including: operational cost and complexity, global security and data fragmentation.

“Cloud IoT Core is designed to help resolve these problems by removing risk, complexity and data silos from the device monitoring and management process,” blogged Chakraborty. “Instead, it offers you the ability to more securely connect and manage all your devices as a single global system. Through a single pane of glass you can ingest data generated by all those devices into a responsive data pipeline – and, when combined with other Cloud IoT services, analyze and react to that data in real time.”

The product is currently in private beta and is being put through its paces by a strong group of semiconductor partners including ARM, Intel and NXP. Google’s propaganda for Cloud IoT Core revolves around global control and scalability, and it’s hard to question the company’s credentials in that respect. If Google wants to there’s no reason why it can’t be a very significant IoT player.