UPDATED 11:09 EDT / SEPTEMBER 27 2016

NEWS

Particle links its IoT development platform to the Google Cloud

Internet-of-things (IoT) development platform Particle Industries Inc. is integrating its platform with the Google Cloud Platform to give developers more flexibility in accessing data from physical sources online.

The collaboration makes it possible for developers to more easily work with large amounts of data and to tap into machine learning models through Google’s native analytics.

Particle, which claims to be the most widely used Internet of Things (IoT) platform, has been making a bid to court enterprise developers with a platform and a set of software tools that enable them to produce prototypes in less than a day using hardware that costs less than $20. The platform uses application program interfaces (APIs) to expose services on connected devices. Through its collaboration with Google, the company has added support for Google’s Cloud Pub/Sub, a many-to-many, asynchronous messaging bus that decouples senders and receivers to allow for secure and available communication between independently written applications. Developers can also access Google’s cloud analytics and machine learning tools.

“Google has some of the best data analytics tools in the world. We’re the most widely used IoT platform. This makes it possible to put them together,” said Zach Supalla, chief executive of Particle. “In many ways machine learning and IoT rely on each other to reach their full potential.”

That potential is still a ways off. While IoT has generated a lot of excitement, it has so far resulted in only a smattering of products and pilot projects within enterprises. Nevertheless, Gartner Inc. has called IoT “the most game-changing IT initiative since cloud computing” and General Electric Co. has committed 1,500 people and more than $1 billion to build a software platform for industrial customers. International Data Corp. is also bullish on IoT’s potential. Its recent Global IoT Decision Maker Survey showed that enterprises are beginning to move past pilot projects into production deployment.

IoT applications are a lot more complex than standard corporate fare, Supalla said. “There are so many technology decisions you have to make. You’re essentially integrating 30 different services,” he said. “What chip? What radio? What protocols?” Complexity is compounded by the fact that many devices don’t have the luxury of polling a data center for instructions, but must make decisions on the spot. Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE, has estimated that as much as 99 percent of all IoT data will never leave the edge of the network.

Particle solves most of the gnarly technical problems, such as the choice of physical hardware connections and communication protocols, Supalla said. “The only thing we don’t do is data.” The integration with Google means that users logging into the Particle console will now have the option of activating the Google cloud for data storage and analysis.

Photo credit: Internet Of Things via photopin (license)

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