SmartThings CEO and founder Alex Hawkinson joined Samsung Electronics president and chief strategy officer Young Sohn on stage to announce a new open software and data exchange cloud for the “Internet of Things” (IoT) called SmartThings Open Cloud. Open Cloud is powered by SAMI, a Data Driven Development platform that Samsung announced last May with simple open APIs and SDKs to send and receive diverse data, regardless of the source.
Because it’s open, SmartThings devices and Samsung’s digital appliances and consumer electronics products will all be able to leverage Open Cloud. Device makers and developers can also connect devices and services directly, further expanding the SmartThings community and accelerating innovation for the IoT at large.
With SmartThings Open Cloud, device makers can bring new products to market more rapidly by focusing on building connected devices without having to build and maintain their own device cloud infrastructure. Open Cloud provides a secure device cloud that accomplishes this by delivering device authentication, connectivity, data sharing and normalisation, and security. It also has the ability to aggregate a diverse, wide array of data from third party applications, services and devices that can be accessed for visualisation and analysis, opening up new potential for discovery within the developer community. With over 100 devices and services already connected to Open Cloud, SmartThings users will also benefit from access to a wider range of devices as well as new capabilities and user experiences. Companies using Open Cloud for their devices will have the option of enabling automatic SmartThings integration to allow access by SmartThings users.
Alongside SmartThings Open Cloud, Samsung also unveiled today the ARTIK™ platform, a family of multi-chip modules for building products used in IoT environments. ARTIK-powered devices will be able to connect directly to Open Cloud using the SDK that will come packaged with all ARTIK modules. Additionally, SmartThings will be using ARTIK in future SmartThings devices, which will result in lower-cost devices with expanded capabilities.
“The Internet of Things ecosystem today is growing steadily, but there are still many barriers that are inhibiting more rapid progress,” said Alex Hawkinson. “For example, device makers today have to build cloud infrastructure that makes bringing connected devices to market a very time intensive and expensive endeavor. SmartThings Open Cloud and ARTIK can now greatly accelerate this process. Together with Samsung, we’re excited to deliver these two key technologies to continue driving innovation, openness, and growth at every level of the IoT from components and devices to applications and services.”
