Billions of everyday devices will soon be connected to the Internet. Today thermostats and smartphones have the capability to talk to each other. Tomorrow virtually all of our devices will be connected. We’re already starting to see trends – imagine a world where your contact lenses can measure glucose levels, your car has always-on 4G LTE and even dairy cows are connected to the Internet to make sure they’re as healthy as possible.
Data has become an integral part of the products we use. As every human being and the products, companies and services they interact with become connected, we believe that how companies collect and interpret that data is going to transform how modern business is done. This is the Internet of Things (IoT).
Unfortunately, the traditional machine-to-machine technology used for today’s IoT is expensive, usually proprietary, custom built and often confined by the boundaries of the enterprise firewall. Not to mention these technologies are outdated by our present standards.
So there’s a need – today – for a secure public applications platform for the Internet of Things that operates at a global scale.
Our CEO John Chen has talked about it before and I want to show you what we’ve been working on. Today at O’Reilly Solid in San Francisco, a new conference exploring the convergence of our physical and digital worlds, I unveiled Project Ion. It’s a codename that we’ve been using internally for our vision for the Internet of Things where the customer is at the center of a connected IoT experience that offers tools and resources to securely connect millions of devices and distill information for real-time decisions.
Project Ion consists of three initiatives where we will explore many components and ideas to act on our vision. The first is a cloud-based product from QNX Software Systems that enables companies and developers to quickly and securely take part in the IoT. We’re moving fast to support our vision and today announced that select companies and partners will soon have the opportunity to access an early version of the product. It’s a secure platform that can scale globally to handle the millions of transactions and exabytes of data generated by these objects every single day.
As our second initiative, we’re building out an IoT ecosystem that consists of partners, carriers and application developers. The third component of Project Ion includes important new partnerships, including memberships in the Industrial Internet Consortium and the Application Developer Alliance, which help drive IoT industry dialogue and innovation forward.
We believe BlackBerry is in the best position to provide the technological building blocks, applications and services needed deliver on the vision of IoT. We’ll have more to share as Project Ion moves forward, but in the meantime I want to hear from you. Will IoT change everything? Visit blackberry.com/project-ion to tell us what IoT means to you or how you’re using it today.
As I said before, this is just the beginning of a new connected world – and we’re glad you’re with us for the ride.
