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The Internet of things (IoT) requires developers to view the world differently than they typically have. The key differentiator is connectivity. With potentially billions of devices connected over the Internet, developers must first look at the issue of connectivity before anything else.
IDC defines the Internet of things as networks of uniquely identifiable endpoints (or “things”) that communicate without human interaction by using IP connectivity, either locally or globally. IDC’s view of the IoT ecosystem includes intelligent systems, network equipment, connectivity services, data integration, and often other types of software, applications, services and security.
The worldwide IoT market will show a compound annual growth rate of 13 percent from $1.3 trillion in 2013 to $3.04 trillion in 2020, according to IDC predictions. By 2020, there will be as many as 28 billion autonomous IoT devices installed. Today, there are about 9 billion installed.
Yet, these are still considered early days for IoT, with many viewing today’s environment as an educational phase for IoT.
“The most fundamental piece of the equation that everybody has to deal with is how do you capture information flowing from a connected thing and then be able to use that connection to the thing to be able to either build an application around the data it produces or build a remote app that might interact with that thing,” said Michael Curry, vice president for IBM’s WebSphere Foundation Portfolio. “So the most fundamental piece is the connectivity to that device. You have to have a connection from the thing into the cloud. Once you have the device connected, a lot of the programming that goes on around that is traditional programming,” Curry continued.
An early mover in the IoT space, IBM in October launched a set of digital tools and software-as-a-service offerings that it said would change the Internet of things landscape by enabling a developer to build an IoT application in a few minutes. IBM built its cloud-based service based on the thousands of IoT client engagements the company has undertaken.
The new service, called the IBM Internet of Things Foundation, enables a developer to quickly and easily extend an Internet-connected device, such as a chip, sensor or controller into the cloud; build an application alongside the device to collect the data; and send real-time insights back to the developer’s business, IBM said.
Not only does this provide the ability to extract data from the rising number of devices across an enterprise, but it physically brings different parts of the business together to innovate and build new business and revenue models.
SilverHook Powerboats uses the IoT Foundation service within IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform as the basis for its real-time powerboat telemetrics platform, allowing it to run complex diagnostic analytics in real time on racing boats traveling at high speeds on the ocean, according to Nigel Hook, CEO of cognitive computing specialist DataSkill and a professional offshore powerboat racer who also is co-founder of SilverHook Powerboats.
“The ocean can be a brutal environment, and it’s the platform that DataSkill and SilverHook Powerboats chose to prove out their IBM solutions for intelligently predicting performance and reliability while on the ocean race track at 140 mph,” Hook said.
Development of the IoT apps related to the powerboats could have been done in other ways using other platforms, but it would have taken much more time and money, Hook said.
“The catalyst in all of this has been Bluemix,” Hook told eWEEK. “With Bluemix, you can develop this technology very quickly. You don’t have to buy all this different software and integrate it. With Bluemix, everything is all readily available to the code writer. You don’t have to wait for IT to provision resources.”
Bluemix, as the name implies, is an amalgamation of all of IBM’s software. “What we’re doing is we’re taking all of our software capabilities and remixing them in the cloud in a way that makes them composable so that companies can take advantage of all of our capabilities in a new way for these types of apps,” Curry said. “So we’re using our analytics technologies in Bluemix, we’re using our mobile application development and runtime technologies in Bluemix, we’re using our integration, messaging, cognitive and security technologies.
“A company can take advantage of all of this without having to go through the traditional acquisition of different pieces and integrating all of that together. We’ve done all that for them and made it available in a scalable, elastic cloud environment,” he continued.
App Developers in Highly Connected IoT World Must Take New Tack
The Open-Source Alternatives
Similarly, wot.io, a data service exchange for connected device platforms, offers a lot of what IBM offers with Bluemix, albeit with best-in-class and open-source components.
“Probably the closest thing to us is IBM Bluemix, but the difference in philosophy shows up,” said Allen Proithis, CEO and co-founder of wot.io. “IBM offers all these services, but at least three-quarters of the services are IBM services. So as long as you like the color blue, it’s great. Philosophically, it’s a big difference because we’re all about best-in-class with many options in every category. We have an open philosophy.”
That openness includes a focus on standards such as AMQP, the Node.js server-side JavaScript framework, Docker containers and more.
“Open source is very important to us,” said Tom Gilley, CTO and co-founder of wot.io. “We contribute back to many open-source projects like Node.js and Docker. We find the open-source community is important in this primordial evolving ecosystem, and we want to support it.”
Wot.io connects to the platforms that are collecting data from the devices. Wot.io is an operating environment that routes the messages to the data intelligently between the connected platforms to the apps that would be most suitable to subscribe to that data.
For casual developers who want to gain access to data, wot.io offers a Web automation framework as a service. For more immersed developers, wot.io offers adapters to data services.
Under a partnership with Kinoma, users of Kinoma Create, a JavaScript-powered IoT construction kit, can access the list of cloud data services through wot.io’s exchange. wot.io’s open operating platform allows players in the IoT ecosystem to connect and share data regardless of device, standards or connectivity, creating a marketplace to bring together application creators, system integrators, analytics providers and hardware companies. With this partnership, Kinoma Create developers can tap into the array of partners in the wot.io exchange to add fully realized, connected devices to the growing IoT market.
Many early IoT adopters are jumping on the open-source bandwagon. Tapping the open-source capabilities of Pentaho, the city of Chicago has created an ETL utility kit that multiple city departments can access to harness massive, open data sets from sources like sensor nodes, city crime data, water-quality statistics and even car-permit data.
The complexity and quantity of these data sets encouraged the city of Chicago to embed Pentaho Data Integration, to transform the city’s data into a single, common format, Tom Schenk, chief data officer for the city of Chicago, told eWEEK. Data is gathered from sensors around the city and disseminated, he said.
“Regarding the Internet of things, we publish traffic density estimates based off GPS units located on our city buses,” Schenk said. “The reason those GPS units are there is so people can be notified that we’re approaching a stop or people can use apps to see where buses are.
“We also can see how dense traffic is. We update crime data every day. Every hour we publish water beach quality data from sensors embedded two meters deep in the beaches around the city of Chicago. We’re able to update every 10 minutes,” he continued.
Jon Levy, open data program manager in the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology, said one of his favorite IoT apps is the SweepAround.us app, which leverages data sets from the ETL Utility Kit to notify residents when to move their cars and avoid tickets. “I live in the city, I have a car and I’ve gotten tickets for not moving my car,” he said. “As a private citizen, I subscribe to this service.”
App Developers in Highly Connected IoT World Must Take New Tack
Perhaps the most significant open-source contribution to the world of IoT application development comes from the Eclipse Foundation.
“Our goal at Eclipse is to be the open-source community that provides the basic technology building blocks for the Internet of things,” Ian Skerrett, vice president of marketing and ecosystem at the Eclipse Foundation, told eWEEK. “We believe for the Internet of things to be successful, it needs to be based on open standards and open source. The current state of the IoT industry is a lot of proprietary vendors attempting to lock customers into their own solutions and protocols.”
At JavaOne 2014 last September, Eclipse delivered an open IoT Stack for Java developers. The stack is designed to simplify IoT development by enabling developers to reuse a core set of frameworks and services in their solutions.
The Eclipse Foundation is working toward creating a Java platform for IoT that is targeted at connecting and managing devices,” said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse. “And our goal with this is to ensure that Java developers have a free and open-source platform for building IoT solutions.”
The Eclipse Open IoT Stack for Java is a set of Java frameworks and OSGi services that make it easy to connect and manage IoT solutions. The Open IoT Stack for Java includes support for OASIS MQTT, Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) CoAP and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Lightweight M2M (LWM2M), as well as providing a set of services for building IoT gateways. In addition to the core Open IoT Stack, a set of industrial frameworks is available to accelerate the process of creating home automation and SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) factory automation solutions.
“IoT is a huge opportunity, and it is obviously attracting an enormous amount of investment and an enormous amount of hype,” Milinkovich told eWEEK. “But I definitely believe that the core infrastructure pieces of the Internet of things have to be based on open source.
“Part of the reason that’s true is simply because any other business model will not scale. When you’re talking about literally tens of billions of devices and sensors and then probably a few billion device gateways, if the software infrastructure that’s running on those is anything other than open source, I just don’t see how the IoT ecosystem can scale to the dimensions required,” he said.
A Tool Maker’s IoT Vision
Development toolmaker Embarcadero Technologies is pursuing its own technology strategy to help developers build a new breed of connected apps for the burgeoning IoT market. Embarcadero focuses on four key areas of interconnection—mobile and desktop devices, gadgets, cloud services and data—and is offering new technologies to address these key areas and enable the development of IoT apps.
The device landscape has moved beyond just PCs, tablets and smartphones to wearables, sensors, home automation and connected cars; and this presents a completely new app ecosystem.
“Apps no longer live on a single device, and instead, are interconnected across a broad range of ‘things’ to deliver an integrated yet distributed solution,” Michael Swindell, senior vice president of products at Embarcadero, said in a statement. “Now, with the increasing focus on IoT app development and the potential for the number of connected ‘things,’ developers will need to focus more on the creation of innovative and practical apps that leverage IoT, and less on the mechanics of connecting each ‘thing.'”
Embarcadero’s technologies for developing connected apps for IoT include the company’s new FireUI user interface design for multiple form factors and devices. It enables developers to create a shared master UI form across all devices and form factors, leveraging common user interface source code that can be optimized for the native platform experience on each specific device form factor.
Embarcadero’s Enterprise Mobility Services (EMS) support connectivity with back-end enterprise data and APIs needed for building connected apps for the IoT. As a turnkey mobile middleware solution, EMS can be deployed on-premise or into a private cloud, and provides user authentication and analytics. In addition, using the latest release of Embarcadero’s Appmethod development platform, developers can build apps for Android, iOS, Windows and OS X that interconnect with IoT via Bluetooth and WiFi app tethering.
App Developers in Highly Connected IoT World Must Take New Tack
IoT and User Experience
User experience will be key. Developers will have consider how IoT affects users.
“From a developer perspective, you have to think about how the Internet of things affects the whole user experience you’re trying to create and thinking about how you distribute info on mobiles and desktops, but also on IoT devices, gadgets and wearables,” said John Thomas, director of developer products at Embarcadero. “At a high level, before you get into the technical aspects of connecting to Bluetooth LE [Bluetooth low energy] or various SDKs or talking to something over REST to interact with a gadget, you need to think about the user experience you can create.”
Embarcadero executives are seeking to solve proximity, access control and other challenges. This becomes more important as IoT moves from the consumer-oriented type of solution that it is today to a more industry-level solution. Enterprises will have to scale to thousands of these gadgets and thousands of users having to interact between them all.
“Developers are still trying to understand the business value of IoT,” Swindell said. “But over time, what we’re really talking about is the ‘API-ification’ of hardware. Five years from now, there will be billions of different types of hardware that will be programmable and will effectively be an API. You would never have thought of a car as a software platform, but it has become one. Over time, all things hardware will start to become programmable objects.”
The industry is still in an educational phase of this movement, Swindell said. “IoT is not a buzzword anymore; it’s reality. It’s going to change the way people interact with everything around them,” he said. “And developers are going to be the ones to deliver these amazing experiences.”
Swindell strikes a chord with his “API-ification” strategy. It is a chord that Raw Engineering is playing with its new built.io Flow service and its focus on what the company refers to as the Internet of APIs.
Raw Engineering’s built.io Flow is designed to enable developers to create highly sophisticated workflows and orchestrate them across various connected systems and automate “things that previously were unthinkable,” said Matthew Baier, chief operating officer.
“Our focus is on APIs to connect all these endpoints,” Baier said. “And all these endpoints are not just sensors or beacons but potentially systems and connected services. And anything that has an API can participate in this. When we talk about IoT, we get real excited about the APIs and all the workflows that are possible because that’s how businesses will participate in IoT is through the integration in the cloud.”
Intel Enters the Picture
A relative newcomer to IoT, Intel in December launched its IoT Platform, an end-to-end reference model designed to simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of things. Intel also introduced integrated hardware and software products based on the new platform and new relationships with an expanded ecosystem of systems integrators that promise to move IoT from infancy to mass deployment, the company said.
Intel’s new offerings are designed to make it easier for solution providers to move IoT to mainstream deployments with a repeatable foundation of building blocks that can be customized for limitless solutions.
“With this platform, we are continuing to expand our IoT product family beyond silicon with enhancements to our pre-integrated solutions that make IoT more accessible to solution providers,” Doug Davis, vice president and general manager of the Internet of Things Group at Intel, said in a statement. “IoT is a rapidly growing market but faces scalability hurdles. By simplifying the development process and making it easier to deploy new solutions that address market needs, we can help accelerate innovation.”
App Developers in Highly Connected IoT World Must Take New Tack
Intel also announced new solutions and relationships to boost the IoT ecosystem. Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Capgemini, Dell, HCL, NTT DATA, SAP, Tata Consultancy, Wipro and others are joining forces with Intel to develop and deploy solutions using their building blocks on the Intel IoT Platform. These solutions will help provide a repeatable foundation for IoT and free up developers’ time to focus on building solutions that address specific customer pain points, Intel said.
Intel is also delivering a road map of integrated hardware and software products to support the IoT Platform. Spanning from edge devices out to the cloud, the road map includes API management and service creation software, edge-to-cloud connectivity and analytics, intelligent gateways and a line of scalable IA processors. Security is fundamental to the road map, with both dedicated security products and security features embedded into hardware and software products, the company said.
Raine Bergstrom, vice president of Intel’s Software and Services group, explained to eWEEK how Web APIs evolved. “We started creating APIs to connect programs to each other. That evolved to Web APIs so you could connect apps across the Internet,” he said. “Now what we’re releasing is an extension of that around devices. Devices are exposing functionality and data through the APIs. And that API management is what’s going to enable us to handle 50 billion devices and 44 zettabytes of data. It’s going to be hugely disruptive.”
Intel’s new API and Traffic Management solution uses Intel Mashery solutions to enable the creation of building blocks that make it easy to build software applications. Customers of the Intel IoT Platform have access to the Intel Mashery API management tools to create data APIs that can be shared internally, externally with partners or monetized as revenue-generating data services for customers.
“It typically takes a vendor of Intel’s class and stature to solve a problem like IoT,” Rob Enderle, founder of the Enderle Group, said in a post on Pund-IT. “Because they have been down this path before, the company can anticipate problems and not just focus on connecting things that weren’t designed to be connected to the Web. Intel’s is a significant effort by one of the anchor vendors in the technology segment, which should both result in faster and safer IoT implementations. And we need both or we are likely to be screwed.”