Google LLC today launched into general availability its Cloud IoT Core managed service that’s designed to help enterprises securely connect and manage their “internet of things” devices.

Google released Cloud IoT Core as a beta product last September, introducing it as a management tool that can automate many of the laborious tasks involved in the management and maintenance of remote hardware.

With Cloud IoT Core, users can set up an authentication mechanism to verify device connections, make configuration changes and apply updates, among other tasks. The service also gives enterprises a way to gather data from IoT sensors and devices via the widely supported MQTT protocol.

In a blog post today, Google Cloud product manager Indranil Chakraborty explained that Cloud IoT Core can also be used with the company’s broader Cloud IoT Service. It allows customers to ingest all of their IoT data and connect it with analytics services such as Google’s Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Dataflow, Cloud Bigtable, BigQuery and Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

Chakraborty seemed keen to illustrate just how useful these capabilities can be, reeling off a list of early-adopter companies that have deployed Cloud IoT Core. They include the oilfield services company Schlumberger Ltd., which said it’s using the service to focus its engineering efforts on building new oil and gas applications and deploying them faster.

“We have been able to build quick prototypes by connecting a large number of devices over MQTT and perform real-time monitoring using Cloud Dataflow and BigQuery,” said Chetan Desai, Schlumberger’s vice president of digital technology.

More important is that this release demonstrates Google’s determination to “fill the gap in IoT,” an areas where it currently trails behind its public cloud rivals Amazon Web Services Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, said Holger Mueller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research Inc.

That much was evident in Google’s acquisition just last week of LogMeIn Inc.’s Xively IoT platform, which provides advanced device management and messaging features for IoT devices. At the time, Mueller said this was a key acquisition for Google because it gives it both a working IoT platform and customers. The release of Cloud IoT Core into general availability builds on that, Mueller said.

“Google IoT Core gets Google in the game,” Mueller said. “CXOs can now consider the Google Cloud Platform as a contender to bet their next-generation applications on.”

Mueller said the next step for Google will be to integrate Xively’s capabilities into Cloud IoT Core as soon as possible in order to give it an edge over AWS and Microsoft. “Completing the IoT Core with Xively’s capabilities and customers is the writing on the wall, and we expect Google to iterate quickly on IoT core.”

It remains to be seen how quickly Google can do that, but Chakraborty indicated it was something the company was working hard on. “Watch this space as we build out Cloud IoT Core with additional features and enhancements,” Chakraborty said.

Image: Thomas Hawk/Flickr