IBM, Reliance arm, KPIT to jointly offer IoT solutions across verticals

Target industries include automotive, insurance, utilities, and industrial automation

Technology giant IBM says it has tied up with firms such as Reliance Group's UNLIMIT, Kone, KPIT and agri tech firm Avanijal Agro to jointly build internet of things (IoT) solutions for local customers in the country.

IBM and UNLIMIT will co-create IoT solutions for specific industry verticals including automotive, insurance, utilities, and industrial automation. For example, insurance companies will be able to reduce cost of damage to goods from tampering, through real-time tracking of cargo via an ‘asset tracking solution.’

UNLIMIT and IBM are also developing IoT solutions for implementation across Reliance Group companies addressing key segments such as – User Based Insurance (Reliance General Insurance), Asset & Vehicle Tracking (Reliance Commercial Finance), Tower Monitoring (Reliance Communications) and Transformer Maintenance (BSES & Reliance Energy). Through this collaboration, UNLIMIT will have access to IBM’s global ecosystem of partners.

As part of the collaboration, IBM will provide its Watson IoT Platform to collect and connect data, including sensor data, from devices and provide use- case specific dashboards. UNLIMIT will design IoT use cases for various industries in the Indian market and build them on the IBM Watson IoT Platform, which provides device registration, IoT rules, advanced analytics, visualization, dashboards, reports and cognitive capabilities for each use case.

Apart from this collaboration, IBM has also announced key partnerships with Kone, KPIT, Tech Mahindra, Avanijal (an agritech startup) and Acculi Labs (a healthtech startup) for IoT.

Some industries that are seeing immense traction for IoT, globally and in India, are automotives as in connected cars, insurance based on usage of vehicles, shop floor automation for maintenance of machines, electronics including smart household goods and finally travel and transportation management. Each of these areas facilitate huge scope for providing products, gathering data and monetising it depending on the use, apart from generally making human life easier. In India, IBM has been working with several organisations in precision agriculture technology to help farmers optimise their resource use.

With a huge boom expected in the IoT market here, is there a need to introduce a level of standardisation to the chaos? “I think it is important to provide a general template for industries to work with where we provide around 80 per cent of the work and 20 per cent can be added on, based on their requirements. This will provide a level of standardisation to the vast technology,” said Sanjay Brahmawar, General Manager, IBM Watson Internet of Things.

“The variation in products varies a lot in IoT for automobiles depending on models. We manage these variations with IBM tools which is part of a continuous engineering portfolio,” said Samir Kulkarni, AVP- Tools Strategy, KPIT. He added that they are looking at leveraging IoT in smart manufacturing apart from transportation and automotive. The company has an existing IoT system in Pune that tracks the local bus service and provides real time updates which is part of the smart city programs running across the country.

Further, many of these companies that implement IBM’s IoT platform, through platinum business partners like Pune-based Datamato, often end up becoming the face of IBM for these organisations. A recent Nasscom report predicted that India will soon have 1.9 billion IoT devices reaching a $9 billion market.

"With 2.7 billion connected devices and growing, the Indian economy, enterprises and consumers are embracing IOT at a rampant pace," said Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT, Customer Engagement and Education, IBM.