AT&T and IBM will start jointly offering services designed to help municipalities, utility companies and other organizations use "Internet of things" technologies to better manage their infrastructure. "There is a huge amount of growth of the things that are connected" to networks, said Michael Curry, IBM vice president of product management. "When you have that many things connected in, you have a big data problem. Companies want to be able to take that data and use it to optimize operations and predict failures."