Amazon announced today that they're pitching their hat into the Internet Of Things boxing ring with their new cloud-based service: AWS IOT. Amazon states that "AWS IoT is a managed cloud platform that lets connected devices easily and securely interact with cloud applications and other devices." AWS IoT can support billions of devices and trillions of messages, and can also process and route those messages to AWS endpoints and to other devices reliably and securely.
AWS IoT will integrate with Lambda, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon S3, Amazon Machine Learning, and Amazon DynamoDB to build IoT applications, manage infrastructure and analyze data.
According to Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist at Amazon Web Services, AWS IOT provides the infrastructure that allows connected cars, factory floors, aircraft engines, sensor grids, etc to securely interact with cloud services and with other devices, all at massive scale. The connection to the cloud is through MQTT or REST protocols, which Barr says makes it a great fit for devices that have limited memory, processing power, or battery life.
AWS IoT offers a free tier of 250,000 free messages (published or delivered) per month, for 12 months.
If this all sounds familiar its because Salesforce announced Thunder, their own IOT cloud offering only last month.
The Salesforce offering seamlessly works across the entire CRM Platform, providing actionable insight in sales, service, marketing or any other business process. They cites examples such as where a thermostat provider can parse through billions of events gathered from weather forecasts, sensors and temperature settings to proactively alert customers on how to manage their HVAC usage within their predefined budget, and where a vehicle assistance service partnering with an auto brand can send personalized offers on behalf of local dealers based on sensor data that tracks fluid levels and mileage.
According to Jason Bloomberg here on Forbes, IoT Cloud runs on four open source products from The Apache Software Foundation: Spark, Cassandra, Kafka, and Storm. Bloomberg says Salesforce uses these products "not because they’re open source, but because they are the best products on the market for supporting the massive scale requirements for IoT Cloud. In fact, these four technologies are at the core of most web scale companies."
What we have now are two major names throwing down their gauntlets in another race for IOT dominance, this time in the Cloud. Where IBM and GE Digital are directly competing in the platform space on the ground, Amazon and Salesforce are taking the fight to the cloud explicitly.
Salesforce is trying to lose the CRM strapline, and morphing the Internet of Things story into the "Internet Of Customers" in an attempt to tie customer service and experiences into IOT. Amazon is going for a more technical play, and may appeal to developers directly.
It'll be the the company with the stronger developer community, and wider options to develop and sell solutions that will win between these two.
