HONG KONG, CHINA – July 19, 2017 – Arrow Electronics, Inc., (NYSE: ARW) today announced that it has integrated IBM’s Watson Internet of Things (IoT) platform and IBM Cloud services into Arrow’s ideation-to-production services. With industry-leading cloud and cognitive services from IBM, Arrow’s customers and prospects in Asia Pacific can now access an expanded spectrum of IoT ecosystem offerings that can help businesses realize the full potential of IoT innovations.
Asia Pacific is set to be at the forefront of IoT, with the number of connected devices expected to increase from 3.1 billion to 8.6 billion by 2020, creating a US $583 billion market opportunity, according to IDC. A critical driver to this growth will be entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses, but very often while these entrepreneurs are armed with ideas, they usually lack the resources and technical expertise to develop these next-generation IoT innovations and bring them to market.
Arrow now offers customers in Asia Pacific the IBM Watson IoT platform via IBM Cloud, giving them access to more than 160 industry-leading cloud services to incorporate ready-to-use capabilities, such as artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, advanced data analytics and cyber security into their latest IoT inventions. The platform is a fully managed, cloud-hosted service designed to make it simple to derive value from IoT devices and provides capabilities that will help boost the quality and innovativeness of IoT products and help them enter the market quickly.
CASCADEMIC Solutions is an industrial IoT solutions provider specializing in turnkey IoT solutions that will benefit from Arrow and IBM’s joint offerings. “With IBM’s Watson IoT platform and Arrow’s ideation-to-production services, we are in a strong position to empower our customers and partners to develop smart city applications with integrated IoT solutions that will help significantly reduce development costs and time-to-market,” said Abdullah Khan. M, president of CASCADEMIC. “We are committed to constantly improving our business offerings so that we can stay ahead of the growing IoT wave.”
“Our combined offering can seamlessly help technology innovators and enterprises build IoT solutions from silicon to cloud to application. The ability to capture and connect data points generated from IoT devices enable them to derive insightful business intelligence and then turn them into decisions for value creation,” said Esmond Wong, vice president of supplier marketing and semiconductor for Arrow’s components business in the Asia-Pacific region. “Arrow is removing barriers and providing the engineering expertise, resources and services that entrepreneurs need to develop innovative and intelligent connected products.”
Arrow’s “sensor-to-sunset” IoT product-lifecycle capabilities–called Things Evolved–draw on the company’s core strengths in sensor and component distribution, enterprise computing and system integration. Arrow’s broad IoT offerings include services specifically designed to help startups advance from idea to product, quickly and cost effectively.
