“One in five companies has begun rolling out Internet of Things (IoT) services and products, and half of those surveyed say IoT will be an important part of their business strategy. That’s according to the latest Economist Intelligence Unit IoT Business Index, published in February this year. These are significant percentages, and they signal that IoT is starting to emerge from the boardroom and now being integrated into businesses and industries. This is evident in the ARM mbed ecosystem, with several commercial shipping products already based on mbed OS 5, and more in engineering sample and volume testing phases of their design and certification. The latest release of this OS, mbed OS 5.4, delivers new features to enable developers to tackle some of the key challenges they’re facing in applications such as connected buildings. Further, the report highlights that transformation is in motion in IoT in 2017: New networks and connectivity coming to wide-scale deployments are a major visible signature of this change. Several analysts, including ABI Research, have examined the range of protocols within IoT and their observations resonate with the above: “Moving forward, it might not be a case of either Bluetooth or ZigBee or Thread, but rather utilizing a combination of these technologies in a single device.” These in turn place strong requirements on the part of the device product development. Through mbed OS 5.4, developers now have the choice, from cellular, Wi-Fi, 802.15.4, BLE, Thread or sub-GHz 6LoWPAN. The mbed OS team also recently demonstrated early features of NB-IoT connectivity at Mobile World Congress in February 2017. As multiple protocol connectivity also impacts storage requirements, mbed OS 5.4 adds flexible filesystem support to address the needs of IoT applications requiring storage within the end node.”
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