For an Internet of Things platform to be successful, it needs to be compatible with as many types of hardware as possible, and considering how prevalent ARM-based processors are, it’s only natural for IBM to want to make its own IoT platform work with them. That’s why the company has formed a new partnership with ARM that will boost their respective IoT offerings, and should have pretty significant impact on the IoT market as a whole.

IBM’s Internet of Things platform can now work with IoT processors designed by ARM, thanks to a new partnership between the two companies. “People can use ARM chipsets to build IoT applications and analytics in an easy, productive way, without worrying about how to glue things together all the time,” said Bret Greenstein, IBM vice president of IoT. IBM has also enhanced its IoT cloud platform, called IBM IoT Foundation, with new capabilities for risk management and data analysis. Based on IBM’s Bluemix platform services, the IoT Foundation is a set of cloud-based configuration, security, operational, and analysis services that can be used to power distributed IoT systems. The partnership with ARM centers on ARM’s mbed line of processors, which were designed specifically for driving low-power, Internet-connected devices. The mbed processors are ideally suited for industrial appliances, weather sensors and wearable monitoring, among other uses, according to IBM.