IBM Unveils IoT Developer Community

Hoping to rally the worldwide development community around the Internet of Things and drive business to its cloud services as well, IBM has launched a community space for programmers to write software to connect remote devices to back-end cloud systems.

The site, called DeveloperWorks Recipes, provides a base for developers to learn about how IoT systems work and how to create code to run these systems.

This is the second community site that IBM has set up in the past month. Last week, the company established DeveveloperWorks Open, to help developers collaborate on building open source business software.

Internet of Things is shorthand for the many smart sensors and embedded computers that are being connected to the Internet, to accomplish tasks such as remotely controlling the temperature in homes, or monitoring the conditions of bridges.

This year, 4.9 billion connected devices will be in operation, and the number of connected devices will balloon to 25 billion by 2020, according to Gartner. All of these devices will need software in some form, and many will connect with back-end cloud services.

The site offers a series of tutorials, hosted on IBM’s Bluemix set of platform services, for embedding analytics and machine learn capabilities into IoT systems.

One tutorial demonstrates how to understand data generated by automobile on-board diagnostic systems, which can be used to troubleshoot vehicle performance issues.

Another tutorial offers step-by-step instructions on linking machines to IBM’s asset management system, which could be used to monitor a wide range of things, such as household appliances or railroad car wheels.

IBM also provides a set of tools to link IoT systems to its Bluemix platform, which could offer services to hook into IT systems, services such as data storage, predictive modeling and geospatial analytics.

One company that has already been using the Bluemix services is u-blox, a Swiss firm that creates and sells electronic modules to the automotive and industrial markets. The company uses IBM analytics and systems management capabilities for its wireless remote IoT devices that require geospatial coordinates.