INTERVIEW MOHAMMED AWAD
Mohamed Awad, VP of Arm’s IoT Business, discusses Arm’s vision for its IoT business with Neil Tyler IOT EVERYWHERE
In the past five years Arm has shipped over 100 billion chips for
applications including smart healthcare, industrial robotics and
the connected home. It is now helping to drive both innovation and
adoption when it comes to the Internet of Things (IoT).
According to Mohamed Awad, VP of Arm’s IoT Business, however,
there is still a lot to be done in terms of the development, deployment
and monetisation of IoT devices, as well as creating a broader
ecosystem, that will help to unlock value and enable developers to
focus on innovation.
“Looking at the IoT, there’s still much to be done when it comes to
addressing all of these issues. It’s going to require a multi-year effort to
deliver on the promises that have been made.
“Over the years, we’ve talked at length about the IoT and today
our focus is on connecting numerous ‘intelligent’ endpoints to an
infrastructure and, as a consequence, creating and generating real and
actionable insight from each one. From smart healthcare to remote
monitoring, from industrial robotics to the connected home we are, in
many respects, still at the beginning of this revolution in connectivity,”
Awad suggested.
When intelligent devices are connected to an infrastructure, new
challenges will emerge. What is done with the data that is generated and
how do you glean meaningful insights are, Awad pointed out, just a few
of the challenges.
“There’s already some intelligence at the edge but we are now actively
connecting smart devices to an infrastructure. Once they are connected
to a broader network we then need to take into account a range of issues
from managing updates to adding new workloads to devices - these are
new concepts for endpoints that will need to be addressed.”
The reality, according to Awad, is that it will
take many years and numerous steps,
and miss-steps, to get these devices
in place and delivering
actionable data.
“Some industries
have been moving
faster than others,”
he conceded, “and
while there is a lot
to do, there have
certainly been
some successes.”
14 26 January 2021 www.newelectronics.co.uk
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