ARM TechCon 2016 is now one for the books. For many of the over 4,500 in attendance, the highlight was hearing from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son on his rationale for buying ARM Holdings and how it fits into his vision of “singularity”. (Not to mention the $100B fund behind this vision.) For me, while it was interesting to listen to the man known as “the Bill Gates of Japan”, the most notable announcement was ARM’s mbed Cloud platform, an innovative step toward a fully-functioning Internet-of-Things (IoT) delivered through an innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model. Here’s what caught my attention.
ARM mbed logo (Source; ARM)
The mbed portfolio has many components, but at the risk of oversimplifying, here’s what you get:

- mbed Device Connector: a software stack that enables you to connect IoT devices to the cloud without building the whole infrastructure yourself
- mbed OS: a platform operating system for devices
- mbed Client: a library that enables devices to connect to partner based cloud services
- mbed TLS: a collection of libraries that provide security and cryptography
- mbed Cloud: a Software-as-a-Service package including device management (any device on any network or cloud), provisioning, and—maybe the most important—secure and reliable software updating