Fragmentation, lack of security, scalability. There are seemingly an unending host of problems that have to be solved by any company hoping to stake a claim in the future of the Internet of Things (IoT) economy. With so much uncertainty about where the industry is heading, sometimes teaming up seems like the best option. At least, this is the logic that brought two of the biggest rivals in chipmaking—Intel and Arm—together to work on IoT.
Lorie Wigle, Intel vice president of Software and Services Group and general manager of IoT Security, believes IoT is transitioning from first proof-of-concept deployments into a new growth phase that is expected, according to industry analysts, to deploy 1 trillion devices by 2035. She is concerned, however, that without collaboration, the dreams of an IoT-driven future may not become a reality.
According to Wigle, it can take 20 minutes per device to get an IoT network up and running using a manual onboarding system. Although that’s not a huge problem for a limited network assembled by—for instance, engineers in a small factory—the amount of labor hours in the long run are completely unscalable, especially for the impending IoT growth explosion.
Intel’s initial solution was the Secure Device Onboard (SDO), launched a year ago. The SDO enables a “late binding” approach to provisioning. With the SDO, users can dynamically discover their target cloud platform for provisioning seconds after the device is powered on in the field. Now, Intel and Arm want to work together to include Arm devices in this ecosystem.
The collaboration will also allow Arm’s new IoT platform, Pelion, to onboard and manage Intel’s x86 platforms in addition to Arm-based IoT devices and gateways, according to EEtimes.
“Customers should be able to choose their onboarding systems of record without being locked into a single cloud provider’s provisioning method or a single device architecture,” Wigle said.
Arm and Intel both dominate different areas of the silicon market. Arm primarily delivers chip architecture for smaller, portable devices, such as smart phones and laptops. Intel, by contrast, is known for making powerful CPUs. This is the first time the two companies have partnered over IoT security.
The announcement that the two chipmakers are to join forces is just one part of Arm’s string of partnerships occurring around the release of the Pelion platform, which focuses on device-to-data connectivity and data management. Further partnerships for Arm include Arduino and MyDevices.