Tech & Innovation

Intel unveils Ignition Lab in Ireland

By Business & Finance
05 June 2015
INTEL ignition lab
Brian Quinn, Martin Curley, Louise Summerton, Frank Jones, Eamonn Sinnott and Rod O’Shea officially open the new Intel IoT Ignition Lab in Leixlip

Intel today announced that its Leixlip campus in Co. Kildare will be the location of the latest Intel Internet of Things (IoT) Ignition Lab, a dedicated facility for the collaborative development of novel IoT solutions.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is considered one of the fastest growing areas of the tech industry today and one which holds enormous potential to drive economic value and social change.

IoT is built around the idea of turning any device/object into a smart device/object by having it communicate with other devices, with the cloud and to produce data that can be used to increase value.

With industry analysts estimating that there will be 50 billion connected devices in the world by 2020, the emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) offers business the opportunity to develop new services, enhance productivity and efficiency, gain new insights, improve real-time decision making, solve critical problems and develop new and exciting customer experiences.

While keen to respond to the opportunities provided, organisations can struggle with the array of technologies involved, market fragmentation, interoperability, security challenges, device manageability and their ability to scale the deployments as billions of new connected devices are deployed and have to connect to and integrate with existing legacy systems.

To address these challenges, Intel is taking a comprehensive approach to accelerating the development and deployment of the IoT with a focus on enabling intelligent devices and gateways, speeding up the connection of legacy systems to the cloud and enabling end-to-end analytics to turn big data into actionable information.

A critical part of this approach is collaborating with the ecosystem to deliver innovative and quality IoT solutions. To facilitate this collaboration Intel has established a number of IoT Ignition Labs which provide optimised environments for engagement, learning and the efficient development of innovative solutions.

To date, Intel has established five Ignition Labs across Europe and the Middle East which are located in the Swindon (UK), Stockholm (Sweden), Munich (Germany), Istanbul (Turkey) and Haifa (Israel).

The goal of the newly established lab is to bring together all components in the IoT value chain from hardware and software vendors, system integrators, business consultants and end users of IoT Solutions.

Intel Ireland’s has a long history of innovation since it began its operations in 1989. Since then, Intel has invested over $12.5 billion in turning the 360-acre former stud farm into one of the most technologically advanced industrial locations in Europe. The semiconductor wafer fabrication facility produces the latest generation silicon microprocessors and is also home to a team of Hardware and Software Engineers that are designing technologies at the cutting edge of the emerging Internet of Things [IoT] and wearable markets.

Also located at the Leixlip campus is the Intel Labs IoT Systems Research Lab which conducts research focused on the Internet of Things with a particular emphasis on distributed edge computing, Machine to Machine (M2M) communications, IoT Applications, and data analytics.

The diversity of these Intel business operations in Ireland provide an opportune backdrop for the new Ignition lab and for the development of solutions in the IoT space. As home to hundreds of hi-tech companies, a vibrant startup community and a closely-knit eco-system of tech innovators, Ireland has the unique potential to become a hub for the IoT computing wave – a computing wave which has limitless possibilities and which is underpinned by innovation.

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