Google Inc. sees a major revenue opportunity in the connected devices that companies are deploying to monitor their operations and automate key activities.

Today, the technology giant introduced a cloud service called Cloud IoT Core that provides a central hub from which those endpoints can be run. At its core is a management tool designed to automate many of the chores involved in maintaining remote hardware. Users can quickly set up an authentication mechanism to verify device connections, roll out configuration changes and apply firmware updates. Cloud IoT Core also provides the ability to collect data over the widely supported MQTT protocol.

The traffic is handled by a service called Cloud Pub/Sub that is capable of supporting millions of devices and reacting to sudden activity spikes without manual input. According to Google, users can stream the measurements they collect from endpoints to their applications or process them in one of the analytics tools available on its platform. Cloud IoT Core integrates with the company’s BigQuery data warehouse and the Bigtable NoSQL store to name a few, as well as several partner-developed offerings. 

Google believes that the new service could find use in a wide range of industries. Manufacturers might employ Cloud IoT Core to aggregate diagnostics data from their industrial equipment and look for problems, while a delivery company could track the vehicles in its fleet.

The service should enable Google to compete on a more even playing field against the other cloud providers working to monetize the connected universe. Amazon Web Services Inc. offers a pair of services for managing connected devices, while Microsoft Corp. has an entire suite. The software giant expanded its lineup last week by launching IoT Edge, a service that provides the ability to perform analytics and other advanced tasks on endpoints as small as a Raspberry Pi miniature computer.

Image: Pixabay