AT&T and IBM have partnered on a pilot collaboration that will give AT&T's enterprise customers deeper insight into their industrial Internet of Things analytics.
The goal of the partnership is to not only collect data from enterprise customers' connected devices, but to extract meaningful insights in order to make key decisions in near real-time. The partnership taps into IBM's Watson platform and the companies' cognitive computing capabilities and connectivity.
The IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) Watson IoT portfolio is being used for connecting, building, launching and managing IoT applications and devices, including analytics capabilities such as predictive maintenance for better asset management.
The IBM Watson Data Platform aids business decisions by combining the data from machines and devices with multiple sources of data, including a customer's sales and inventory data along with publicly available information, such as weather and road conditions.
Using the information from AT&T's IoT network and the IBM Watson Data platform, AT&T's IoT analytics can ingest large amounts of data in order to create models with the appropriate machine learning libraries and open-source technology to help predict potential failures or machine malfunctions.
"We have more than 30 million connected devices on our network today and that number continues to grow -- primarily driven by enterprise adoption," said Chris Penrose, president of IoT Solutions at AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T), in a prepared statement. "Businesses are eager for actionable data insights from their connected devices that help improve their processes and take the guesswork out of decision-making. Integrating the IBM Watson Data Platform into our IoT capabilities will be huge for our enterprise customers."
Last year, AT&T and IBM announced they were integrating AT&T Flow Designer with the IBM Watson IoT Platform and IBM's cloud solution. Those blended solutions, which allow developers to build, deploy and scale their IoT applications, are now available to enterprise developers.
— Mike Robuck, Editor, Telco Transformation