MAY 2, 2016 @ 09:00 AM

Samsung Artik IoT Cloud Lacks Key Enterprise Features

Samsung Electronics hosted its annual developer conference, SDC, on April 27th and 28th at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It announced the availability of Artik Cloud, a dedicated cloud platform for connecting the Internet of Things. Samsung claimed that its vision for Artik Cloud is to enable developers to build connected applications instead of silos.

With major platform vendors jumping on the bandwagon, the IoT PaaS market is heating up. AWS IoT, Azure IoT, and IBM Watson are gearing to become the key contenders of this segment. Since the acquisition of 2lemetry, Amazon has been busy bringing IoT capabilities to AWS. Microsoft has constantly been adding new features to Azure IoT platform. IBM is augmenting Bluemix through IoT and cognitive services.

With the tall claim of being the most connected IoT cloud, will Samsung Artik Cloud make a dent in the market? At least, not in its current form. Samsung built a primitive cloud platform that has basic device management, rules engine, data aggregation, and visualization. Developers will be able to onboard devices by creating manifests that describe device capabilities. They can configure machine-to-machine communication through MQTT and other supported protocols. The time-series datasets sent by the devices can be visualized within the portal. The platform also comes with a simple rules engine to trigger an action when a condition is met. These are the key capabilities of Artik Cloud in its initial version.

In the current IoT landscape, device management, rules engine, and visualization are considered as table stakes. They are available with almost every IoT platform out there in the market. Developers expect more when it comes from a mature player like Samsung. Artik Cloud in its current form leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t meet many of the requirements that qualify an enterprise IoT cloud platform.

The security layer for authenticating and authorizing the devices lacks the strength needed for enterprise deployments. When using digital certificates, customers are expected to work with Samsung team to register the devices. Even for publishing the devices, customers will need to wait for Samsung to approve their devices. Other enterprise platforms such as AWS IoT offer self-service capabilities for secure device registration and publishing.

One of the biggest gaps in the platform is the lack of analytics. Apart from simple visualization of time-series data, there is no data processing pipeline for analyzing the streams in real time. Customers are expected to export the dataset to other platforms to perform Big Data processing and analytics. From ingestion to stream analysis to batch processing, Artik Cloud lacks everything related to data processing.

Samsung’s IoT strategy consists of Artik hardware modules along with the recently announced cloud platform. With the acquisition of SmartThings, the company gained access to the consumer market. SmartThings is one of the popular connected home products that ships with the hub, multiple devices, and a cloud platform to host custom applications. With the availability of Artik Cloud, the company hopes to attract serious IoT developers building enterprise applications.

Even if Samsung is just targeting the consumer segment, lack of tight integration between SmartThings and Artik Cloud comes across as a major gap in the platform. Developers using SmartThings will need to expose endpoints hosted in an entirely different environment than Artik Cloud. For a platform that claims to be well-connected, developers expect better integration with its existing offering.

It is not easy for a hardware company to deliver the required scale and agility expected by the current generation of developers. On the other hand, the Big Data landscape is transforming at a rapid pace. Enterprise IoT platforms need to offer the latest and the best in Big Data processing and analytics. Artik Cloud doesn’t even have the basic data processing and analytics capabilities that are essential for enterprise and industrial IoT deployments. Interestingly, Artik Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services alongside AWS IoT.

While it’s easy to go live with an IoT platform with basic features, competing with established platform companies is a tough task. Samsung may have to focus its energy on the embedded devices and hardware platforms than building an IoT cloud.

Janakiram MSV is an analyst, advisor, and architect. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook andLinkedIn.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2016/05/02/samsung-artik-iot-cloud-lacks-key-enterprise-features/2/#2f8d89371f9d