Intel Touts Array Of Market-Ready IoT Offerings To Help Partners Succeed In Industrial Market

As Intel intensifies its industrial Internet of Things push, the company is bringing market-ready offerings to partners to help them quickly and easily scale projects beyond the workplace, said Steen Graham, general manager of IoT ecosystem and channels for Intel’s IoT Group.

’Increasingly today, IoT is driving the disruption in this industry,’ he said. ’Connecting the physical world that we live in to the internet is driving massive digital transformation. But IoT deployments require IT and OT collaboration in a new world of standards and requirements.’

Graham, speaking Wednesday during IoTConnex, a virtual conference hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company, said to fully address the challenges that customers are facing in the marketplace, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company has an array of offerings to help partners bring IoT to market quickly and seamlessly.

[Related: IoTConnex Virtual Conference 2017]

’We have ... core capabilities we’re bringing to the market to help solve the challenge of deploying IoT faster and easier,’ he said.

Those capabilities include Intel market-ready offerings around retail, manufacturing and safety, which are hardened scalable platforms that have been proven to solve real-world problems and use cases.

For instance, Intel has a smart building market-ready offering, which uses a cloud-based Prescriptive Data NANTUM solution, built on Intel technology, to help building facility managers create smarter and more efficient buildings.

’Buildings are another incredible opportunity for IoT disruption … there’s over 5 million commercial buildings in the U.S. alone,’ Graham said. ’The ability to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by optimizing the buildings is a fantastic opportunity for IoT, but [IoT also has the capability ] to increase tenant comfort.’

Graham said that customers in the industrial segment are looking to embark on a ’digital transformation’ journey, essentially moving from their more traditional, manual processes to digitizing their operations so that they can improve efficiency and reduce system downtime.

About 70 percent of global 2000 CEOs will center their strategies around digital transformation by 2017, according to a report from research firm IDC.

As part of this digital transformation strategy, companies are looking at three stages of deployments in IoT: connecting unconnected systems, taking smart systems to the next level with tools like predictive maintenance, and driving autonomous decision-making at the edge.

Customers, however, are still facing a plethora of challenges when deploying IoT across all three of these stages – for instance, grappling with a complex and fragmented landscape, a lack of hardened offerings and security risks, said Intel's Graham.

Intel currently offers an array of IoT tools to help the industrial marketplace leverage IoT. Those tools include machine learning with its recent acquisition of Nervana Systems; depth perception sensing with its RealSense technology; and programmable solutions with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to allow the market to rapidly adapt to algorithms.

’As these new markets expand they will create channel opportunity that will continue to fuel growth for other industries where the VAR plays a critical role such as the need for more servers to support the increase in demand for data analytics or cloud services that will associated with these Intel extended markets,’ said Kent Tibbils, vice president of marketing at ASI, a Fremont, Calif.-based Intel systems builder.