By Lisa Fleisher 

ARM Holdings PLC, whose chip designs already dominate the smartphone market, is making a push to get its technology into the next wave of connected objects.

Britain-based ARM on Wednesday introduced an operating system and a software system to manage data that it believes will smooth the way for companies to start churning out products connected to the Internet, a semiconductor market that analysts estimate could be valued at as much as $50 billion by 2020.

While ARM doesn't have the global name recognition of Cisco Systems Inc. or Intel Corp., its chip designs are found in more than 95% of all smartphones. It designs the basic architecture of the chips, which are then made by the likes of Qualcomm Inc. and others.

ARM traditionally earns its money in two ways: selling intellectual-property licenses for its designs to manufacturers, and charging royalties when the chips ship.

Company officials see big growth in an area known in the industry as the Internet of Things. The announcements on Wednesday came a week after the company announced a new, more powerful chip design for connected devices.

The promise of connected objects has been kicking around for more than a decade, as technologists described the potential benefits of remotely controlling thermostats, monitoring heart rates and keeping an eye on supply-chain conditions. But only recently have companies begun to make and market products.

One reason, ARM officials say: It takes too long to create software to get started, and it is too hard to manage all the information once it is gathered. ARM is hoping its latest products speed things up.

"You can have a lot more, smaller companies innovating," said Patrick Moorhead, president of Moor Insights & Strategy, a high-tech analyst firm based in Texas. "To me, that is a snowball effect where that leads to more innovation and more people doing really cool stuff."

The operating system, called mbed OS, is the first for ARM, which has been developing silicon technology for nearly 25 years in Cambridge, England, that serves as the blueprints for the chips that provide computing power for many commercial products.

Like the OS for a smartphone--for instance Apple Inc.'s iOS or Google Inc.'s Android, which are the software interfaces between the user and devices--Internet of Things operating systems control the basic functions of a device.

The mbed OS will be available on chips designed by the company.

The other component--software to manage the data and devices--opens the door to a new line of revenue: software that can be used with chips, regardless of whether they are running on ARM-based chips.

"They can go in and make money at different points of the process where they hadn't made money before," Mr. Moorhead said.

Research firm Gartner Inc. estimated that the semiconductor market for the Internet of Things will be $10 billion to $13 billion in 2015, rising to $45 billion to $50 billion by 2020.

Currently, there are several companies that have created operating systems for the small, low-power chips that are necessary for everyday objects. The operating systems have to be tiny, perhaps doing as little as one task. A device might need to wake up every few minutes, take a temperature reading and send it out, said Andrew Markham, a lecturer at the University of Oxford.

"There are all these weird and wonderful operating systems," he said, but no go-to choice, he added.

Write to Lisa Fleisher at lisa.fleisher@wsj.com

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