Particle brings IoT cloud to enterprise users

Internet of Things platform provider Particle announced its enterprise deployment platform, Particle Cloud, on Tuesday.

The platform has been in beta for a few months and Particle claims it has already been used by Fortune 500 companies.

Particle Cloud makes IoT deployment a faster and less cumbersome experience. In a press release, the firm said it aims to ship “secure, reliable, and easy to use” IoT products in under six months.

“IoT is a new industry with huge potential. However, the unfortunate reality is that many businesses’ IoT initiatives flounder or fail,” said Zach Supalla, Particle co-founder and CEO. “The strongest business case for building an IoT product is irrelevant if you can’t execute. Companies who work with Particle actually ship their products.”

That’s evidenced by the company’s work with Keurig, which used the Particle Cloud to start collecting data on thousands of brewers.

“We made more progress on our first day with Particle than we had in months without them,” said Michael Cunningham, chief information officer of Keurig. “Within six months we began collecting data from thousands of connected brewers in the hands of consumers.”

Particle Cloud has a passel of projects

Particle has also worked with Briggs Healthcare and French utility giant Engie. It cites more than 20 crowdfunded projects it has worked on, which have raised “millions of dollars.”

Companies working on the Particle Cloud platform are able to prototype devices for under $20 and have a working model in a few weeks. From there, developers can choose to launch the product or scale it to meet demand. Large firms can take advantage of Particle’s Device Management Console, to manage an entire fleet of IoT devices.

Particle has partnered with a wide range of companies to make the enterprise platform inclusive. Google, Microsoft, and IFTTT provide customer insights to Particle customers, Broadcom, Cypress, u-blox, and ST deliver hardware solutions, and T-Mobile, Twilio, and Telefonica provide networking for IoT devices.

Workday gives IBM big win with seven-year cloud deal

Workday announced a 7-year cloud infrastructure deal with IBM Softlayer today to run their development and testing services on IBM’s cloud, handing IBM a huge win in the process.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.

It’s a big deal from a number of perspectives. First of all, it’s the size and scope of the deal, running seven years. Secondly, it’s a big-name SaaS vendor moving a big part of its workload to IBM’s cloud and forgoing a big competitor such as Google or Microsoft (or even sticking with AWS).

Workday runs parts of its business on AWS, but it chose to go with IBM for this aspect of its business, which could lead to additional business, reasons R Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

“While this isn’t the production workload, it could lead to the shift from Amazon to IBM and that’s the big question — if you have test and development, why not production as well?,” he asked.

Workday, which sells cloud ERP software had originally looked at HP, but when they got out of the cloud business, Workday had to look elsewhere, according to Wang. He says that Google and Microsoft weren’t really options because in the case of Microsoft, it already offers Dynamics ERP (cloud and on-prem) and Google could be looking to move into this space, as well. Workday wanted to stay away from vendors who could potentially compete with them, Wang explained.

“Workday doesn’t want to be beholden to another competitor. It’s their biggest fear and IBM isn’t competing with Workday,” he said.

As for IBM, it brings the company a big-name cloud client into the fold, as it tries to compete with AWS, Google and Microsoft in the cloud infrastructure market. IBM is ahead of Google in third place in the latest marketshare numbers provided by Synergy Research.

But not all analysts agree with Synergy. A recent report from Gartner indicated IBM wasn’t doing as well as Synergy’s numbers suggested. Regardless, this deal should be good news for Big Blue.