Google Introduces Cloud IoT Core for Managing Devices at Scale

By Ken Briodagh May 17, 2017

The IoT industry has been awaiting this day with either trepidation or eagerness for quite some time. The emotion that is inspired is likely directly linked to whether the leviathan from Mountain View is now a competitor or potential enabler of their business.

What’s causing all this? Google has finally announced its full-scale IoT Cloud Core solution, which is designed to help users manage devices and data in the cloud, at scale. Competitors better watch out. Google isn’t used to losing.

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service called Google Cloud IoT Core makes it easy for users to securely connect globally distributed devices to GCP, centrally manage the devices, and build rich applications by integrating with Google’s powerful data analytics services. In addition, the company has said that all data ingestion, scalability, availability, and performance needs will be automatically managed as a service within GCP.

The new product will provide new operational insights designed to help businesses react to, and optimize for, changes in real time.

This should allow:

• Utilities to monitor, analyze, and predict consumer energy usage in real time

• Transportation and logistics firms to stage the right vehicles/vessels/aircraft in the right places at the right times

• Oil & gas and manufacturing companies to enable intelligent scheduling of equipment maintenance to maximize production/minimize downtime

Enterprises, especially global, distributed ones, that rely on industrial devices such as sensors, conveyor belts, farming equipment, medical equipment, and pumps are struggling to monitor and manage those devices, Google said, because of operational costs and complexities, patchwork security frameworks, and data fragmentation.

The company said that Cloud IoT Core is designed to help resolve these problems by removing risk, complexity, and data silos from the device

monitoring and management process by putting all of those functions through one global system, a single viewpoint into a responsive data pipeline, and then analyzing and reacting to that data in real time.

“With Google Cloud IoT Core, we have been able to connect large fleets of bicycles to the cloud and quickly build a smart transportation fleet management tool that provides operators with a real time view of bicycle utilization, distribution and performance metrics, and forecasts demand for our customers,” said Jose L. Ugia, VP Engineering, Noa Technologies.

Cloud IoT Core is currently available as a private beta, and Google has already partnered with several hardware and software players:

Cloud IoT Device Partners

• Actions Semiconductor

• Allwinner Technology

• ARM

• Marvell

• Microchip

• Intel

• Mongoose OS

• NXP

• Realtek

• Sierra Wireless