Arm flexes IoT muscle with Stream Technologies deal
Chip design giant Arm Holdings is betting big on IoT with its acquisition of Stream Technologies. Founded in 2000, Stream supports physical connectivity across all industry-standard wireless protocols and devices that ensure the availability of IoT data.
Stream is already a leading connectivity management tech provider that maintains more than 770,000 managed subscribers and an average of 2TB of traffic per day. The company is to be integrated with Arm’s Mbed IoT Device Management platform, with the goal of enabling connectivity management of every device regardless of location or network.
“The addition of the Stream team to Arm accelerates our mission to securely manage IoT complexities from chip to the cloud, enabling our customers to focus their efforts on deriving real actionable insights from the data generated by their connected devices,” Hima Mukkamala, senior vice president and general manager of IoT Cloud Services at Arm, said in a statement.
Arm has been making noise about IoT investment for a while now. Back in March, Arm teamed up with graphics processor designer Nvidia to bring deep learning to IoT devices, by integrating Nvidia’s Deep Learning Accelerator (NVDLA) into Arm’s Project Trillium machine learning intellectual property suite. The goal is to be able to integrate advanced AI capabilities at scale into IoT projects. The collaboration could push rival semiconductor companies to release similar offerings to compete with the two companies, which are already industry leaders in machine and deep learning.
Arm, which is owned by SoftBank, has a vision of a trillion connected devices by 2035. Ensuring that companies can derive real business value from IoT data is key to ensuring this happens. This success also hinges on data being secure, quickly accessible, and yielding meaningful insights.
“This scalability is critical as we move from billions to trillions of connected devices,” added Mukkamala
As the addition of Stream to Arm’s existing offerings will create a robust end-to-end IoT platform. This will be crucial for Arm in the years to come as the IoT landgrab gathers pace.