The ""Internet of Things" gathers momentum

One of the current buzz-phrases doing the rounds is The Internet of Things, and Amazon is capitalising on it with the launch of its new Amazon Web Services IoT business, which allows a wide sweep of industries from manufacturing to healthcare systems to develop applications that connect devices through Cloud services.

The beta version of the service is now available, Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels said last week, promising that the connection to the Cloud will be fast and lightweight, making it a good fit for devices that have limited memory, processing power, or battery life.

Amazon’s AWS IoT framework not only gathers data from devices, but provides device-specific management and introspection functions as well.

Data Corp. analysts have predicted that the Internet of Things will generate revenues around $1.7 trillion by 2020, and technology firms like Google Inc, Intel Corp, Cisco Systems Inc, Samsung Electronics and telecoms majors such as Vodafone and Verizon are betting heavily on it to drive revenue and profit in the future.

The Reuters news service reports that Microsoft Corp also launched an IoT suite last week, a further indication of how serious the big players on the global stage are about the phenomenon.

In India, Intel announced this week that it will set up 100 Internet of Things (IoT) centres across Indian academia institutions and award PhD fellowships for 2015 to five students.

Amazon customers using the service will have to pay only for what they use, and prices will be determined on the number of messages, defined by Amazon as a 512-byte block of data, exchanged between devices and Amazon Web Service IoT. The internet giant says it will offer customers 250,000 free messages a month, for 12 months. Prices start at $5 for every million messages.

Earlier this year, Amazon bought 2lemetry, a start-up that developed an enterprise-focused platform to track and manage IP-enabled machines and other connected devices.

For a more technically-oriented explanation of Amazon’s new product click here:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2990957/internet-of-things/aws-takes-iot-beyond-data-analytics-into-management.html