Up in the Cloud and Into the Wild, Zebra Unleashes Zatar

by TODD STOLARSKI | Nov. 13, 2015

What a big week for Zebra Technologies Corporation. On Tuesday, the publicly traded Lincolnshire IL-based provider of tracking and other remote technology solutions announced third-quarter sales of $916 million, more than triple its results for the same period in 2014. Yesterday, Zebra also released its new platform Zatar, an Internet of Things (IoT) cloud service with a dedicated web portal.

Zatar, a portmanteau of the words zebra and avatar, provides real-time visibility into organizations' assets, people and transactions. The service gives registered users within your organisation remote access for devices through an individually assigned avatar.

The integration between Zatar and ARM will allow products powered by ARM mbed-enabled chips to easily register and work with the Zatar IoT cloud service, something that has long been an issue when dealing with devices of multiple brands in the cloud.

Zach Selby, Vice President of Marketing, IoT Business at ARM, said: "Cloud service interoperability and integration for IoT devices is one of the biggest challenges facing developers. The mbed-enabled Zatar IoT Cloud Service allows developers to securely transfer data between connected devices and the cloud with minimal effort and write applications that can work with heterogeneous hardware platforms, which will accelerate the creation and deployment of IoT solutions at scale".

Zebra’s Zatar is collaborating with a handful of mbed ecosystem silicon partners, including Atmel, Freescale and Renesas. Those partnerships will hope to deliver solutions from the edge node to the cloud along with full software support, security and plug-and-play connection that works out of the box. The potential of Zatar’s enterprise solutions reads better than the script to the upcoming James Cameron movie Avatar: 2, even if that film had a cast filled only with zebras.

To learn more about Zatar here.

Read the full press release here.

To contact the author, write totodd.stolarski@builtworlds.com or find him on Twitter @toddstolarski.