Samsung announces Artik Cloud service that allows businesses to collect and analyze data from the internet of things; service is free for hobbyists
Agam Shah / PCWorld :
Context & Ripple Effects
Artik Cloud completes a stack Samsung has been assembling for a year: it started with the Artik chip line at $10-$100 in May 2015, then put money into Sigfox's low-power network for connected objects, and had already committed at CES to an open IoT platform for developers.
The move lands in a crowded field: Amazon opened AWS IoT in beta last October, and Bosch launched its own IoT cloud in March with plans to sell it externally in 2017 — so Samsung is entering a market where industrial rivals are already staking out cloud territory.
First-order effects
- Businesses get a hosted service for collecting and analyzing device data without building their own backend, while hobbyists get free access — a deliberate funnel that seeds the developer base Samsung promised at its CES smart-home strategy unveiling.
Second-order effects
- AWS IoT now faces a competitor that owns the endpoint silicon, letting Samsung bundle chips and cloud in a way Amazon cannot match on hardware; Bosch's plan to commercialize its internal cloud in 2017 also gets a pricing benchmark set by a free tier.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, IoT platforms consolidate around vertically integrated chip-plus-cloud stacks, and free developer tiers become table stakes — squeezing standalone middleware vendors out of the middle layer between devices and analytics.
The trend: IoT vendors are converging on end-to-end platforms that pair their own silicon with cloud services, using free tiers to lock in developers ahead of enterprise monetization.