Intel Kills Three IoT Projects: Internet of Things Reality Check
Intel has quietly killed three Internet of Things (IoT) projects, essentially injecting a timely reality check into the heavily hyped IoT market.
Among the IoT efforts Intel will abandon, according to ZDnet: The developer board Galileo and compute modules Joule and Edison. Galileo was a partner project with Arduino to take on the Raspberry Pi. The Edison platform was meant to serve and improve IoT devices while the more powerful follow-up Joule targeted robotics. Still, Intel remains committed to IoT market segments that “access, analyze and share data,” a company spokesperson told ZDnet.
Despite the project cancelations, Intel has shown some momentum in the IoT sector. The company generated $721 million in IoT-related revenues in its Q1 2017, up 11 percent from the corresponding quarter last year. That’s not huge growth, but it’s growth nonetheless.
IoT Market Matures
Even as some IoT products and services fall out of the market, that could be a simple sign of industry maturity. In a recent analysis, 59 percent of IoT companies earned a high maturity grade – nearly double the number of companies that received a high IoT maturity ranking in an analysis that was completed in September 2015, ABI Research noted.
The number of connected IoT devices, sensors and actuators will reach over 46 billion by 2021. That’s a 200 percent increase from from 2016, according to Juniper Research.
Still, plenty of challenges remain. Chief among them: Effective IoT security — especially amid the rising tide of IoT malware and ransomware.
Historically, the companies that have had the best success in making embedded boards have done a great job of delivering technical information and software libraries.
Intel seems to think it is enough to build a better product and wait for sales orders to pile in.
Arrow will occasionally roll out a new dev board and offer it at a discounted price.
And on top of that, they will pay technical sales reps to offer a class that will have a dozen completed projects as exercises.
So for the price of a dev board, you get a catered breakfast and lunch, on top of your dev board, and someone live to walk you through the application examples that are relevant to you. And they have already poked at manufacturer support to answer the questions you will ask when you see the product the first time.
Intel on the other hand when they roll out something new wants to set up a training class and charge several hundred dollars for it. here is an example:
OpenCL class for $695
https://www.altera.com/support/training/course/iopnclbsp.html?utm_source=Altera&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Training&utm_content=_NA+August+ILT+and+VLT+2017
If they taught these classes for free, like other chip and board level vendors, they would have fewer instances of having to kill off products that failed to compete in the marketplace with other companies that have a better level of software and information support.
Same basic marketplace dynamic killed the Atom cpu.
Intel is trying to enter other markets and expecting the same customer response as when they only made CPUS for desktop and servers. Bad idea.