For nearly 30 years the Arm ecosystem of more than 1,000 partners collaborated thanks to an underlying shared success model to deliver more than 150 billion chips. This ecosystem has been described as the oxygen that fuels this collective engagement and makes development as simple as breathing.

When it comes to solving the challenges in developing and deploying the Internet of Things (IoT), the Arm ecosystem model has never been more applicable, as IoT takes a village to be successful and a single company cannot do it alone. Thus far, our ecosystem model has resulted in billions of IoT devices powered by Arm-based chips from hundreds of our partners having shipped. And to simplify IoT for developers, during the past ten years we have built a vast ecosystem around our free, open-source IoT operating system, Mbed OS, which includes more than 425,000 third party software developers and more than 150 Mbed-enabled boards and modules.

Collaboratively shaping the future of Mbed OS

As the market expands to hundreds of billions and ultimately a trillion connected devices, our ecosystem model will only be successful if our partners can continue to collaborate and differentiate. That's why today we're announcing our new Mbed OS Partner Governance model, based on direct feedback from our silicon provider partners. This is an important step towards fueling increased innovation and differentiation within our IoT ecosystem. Through this model, we are empowering our silicon partners with the ability to help shape and determine the future direction of Mbed OS, while still maintaining our strong commercial leadership and backing that we have provided over the years.

While Mbed OS has always been an open-source IoT operating system, we are shifting its governance so that our silicon partners can directly influence future development and enhance our efforts in building out new capabilities, features and functionality, which are critical in scaling to a trillion connected devices. One new mechanism for enabling this is the establishment of monthly Product Working Group meetings where, together with our silicon partners, we will prioritize and vote on which new capabilities will be added to Mbed OS. Any Mbed Silicon Partner Program member is welcome to join at no cost. Several of our silicon partners including Analog Devices, Cypress, Maxim Integrated, Nuvoton, NXP, Renesas, Realtek, Samsung, Silicon Labs and u-blox are already actively participating in the working group.      

Unique approach to partner governance

Our new governance approach is unique in that we are offering a collaborative approach with our partners in implementing new product capabilities, whereas most commercial IoT OSes are often developed by a single vendor without a clear model on how hardware partners can contribute. The outcomes of the Product Working Group discussions will ultimately benefit our broader IoT ecosystem. For example, we are working on new low-power battery optimization based on initial contributions from our partners, which will extend the battery life of devices out in the field.

Come join us in building out the future direction of Mbed OS and let's work together to make IoT simple, secure and scalable to deploy.