Arm’s Pelion IoT Platform provides “the Full IoT Stack” of services to OEMs and EDMs to connect, secure, and manage the lifecycle of IoT devices.
Arm is the world’s largest intellectual property licensing company in the semiconductor industry. Its Cortex architecture powers over 150 billion chips, ranging from small microcontrollers embedded into small sensors to large server farms and supercomputers. Additionally, Arm’s cores are powering almost all smartphones and tablets worldwide.
One of the advantages of Arm’s core architecture is the performance vs. power consumption ratio. When compared to other processors from leading vendors, the Cortex architecture provides more bang for the watt.
Additionally, as a licensing company, Arm doesn’t manufacture any of their chips, and it is up to its partners to come up with the design and manufacturing of Arm-based solutions. This approach keeps the market competitive, and allows OEMs and ODMs to create their proprietary products as well.
Since the beginning, Arm’s cores have been in use for IoT devices. In 2016, the company launched ARM mbed OS, as an “open-source embedded operating system designed specifically for the ‘things’ in the Internet of Things.”
In 2018, Arm acquired Treasure Data and Stream Technologies, combining the managed gateway services for wireless technologies, including cellular, LoRa, and satellite. In October of the same year, Arm launched the Pelion IoT Platform SaaS service built around Arm Mbed Cloud plus wireless gateway technology.
According to Arm, Pelion consists of three core IoT services that can be combined or used separately based on product requirements. The Connectivity, Device, and Data management services solve many of the challenges common to most IoT projects, allowing OEMs and ODMs to focus on product development.
To learn more about Pelion, and the latest developments on Arm’s IoT solutions, we spoke to Dave Weidner, senior director, Pelion Market Development, at Arm. Weidner joined us from his home in Seattle, Washington, on a Webex call.
IoT Times
Good morning Dave, thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Can you give us a brief description of Pelion and how it fits into Arm IoT offerings?
Dave Weidner
Sure, thank you for having me.
About three years ago, we formed the IoT Services Group organization that I’m a part of, which is what the Pelion brand falls underneath. The IoT services group was built with the premise of creating a horizontal platform comprehensive services that enable organizations to overcome the challenges they see for onboarding, securely connecting devices, managing the device lifecycle, and getting data off those devices.
The Pelion brand is the brand that sits on top of our software services offering within. This comes into play by being able to provide, in the simplest of terms, this software framework to simplify and take time to market down. We’re getting IoT devices connected and established.
Building on top and leveraging the architecture and the scale of that Arm ecosystem that we have from the device side, we focused on putting together this software to help enterprise OEMs customers effectively be able to create these IoT solutions and eliminate those barriers to entry and the fragmentation that comes across that.
More importantly, the focus around that being is making sure that those devices are connected quickly, securely. And then you can get actionable data off those devices.
IoT Times
We understand that the Pelion platform consists of three components or services. Can you elaborate on that?
Dave Weidner
Within the Pelion offering, we have only three offerings; connectivity management is one of those, which provides access to over 600 wireless networks in 200 plus countries. We also have an offering that helps to secure device management and secure device lifecycle. Being able to onboard and bring devices on, and manage the application side of that device, the firmware updates, applications to get deployed, and securely pull the data off those devices and maintain that device through its lifecycle.
So when you think about the building blocks, connectivity management provides the ability to create that network or connection lifecycle. And device management provides the lifecycle management of the device from onboarding to decommissioning.
And then, we have the data management portion. We provide data capabilities to take the data off the device and allow people to create insights off that data and manage their devices accordingly.
IoT Times
Recently, you announced a partnership with Hexing, a Chinese device manufacturer focusing on the power utility market, offering smart meters, and other measuring equipment.
How is Pelion helping Hexing to leverage the Arm technology using the Pelion platform?
Dave Weidner
The Hexing partnership talks about the way we are going into vertical markets, approaching and working with companies in the utility space. We’re taking their advanced metering infrastructure solutions as well as their meters. But they’re using the capabilities of our device management and our device security to deploy those at scale, and focus on building their value on top of us.
And that’s been the whole Arm value proposition. From day one, we’ve created infrastructure, we’ve created the foundation in the underlying. People are building connectivity solutions, they’re using our chips, and then they’re putting their value on top of that.
In the second part of the interview, we’ll talk about collaboration with software companies, such as Microsoft, and the advantages of embedded and integrated SIMs for connectivity and security.