Image by Siyuwj CC BY-SA 3.0
Three IoT companies — Advantech B+B SmartWorx, Connect2 Systems, DevicePilot — have demonstrated what they say is the first end-to-end IoT ecosystem with re-usable infrastructure and open industry standards for industrial and commercial applications at scale.
Their system supports remote monitoring and management of industrial ultra-low power IoT sensor devices using constrained wireless networks and open IoT standards developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The demonstration featured Wzzard Wireless sensor Nodes from Advantech B+B SmartWorx and inclinometer wireless sensor nodes from Connect2 Systems.
Duncan Purves, Co-Founder, of Connect2 Systems, said: “This is the first public demonstration of open, standards-based, end-to-end IoT device management, which we’ve built using commercially-available technology and industrial IoT devices.
“Manufacturers and suppliers are under pressure to shorten the time-to-market of new products, which means they may be shipped and deployed with embedded software bugs or features missing. Industrial IoT devices are typically deployed in inaccessible places and the cost of servicing the devices manually to upgrade the firmware or change configuration settings can be prohibitive. Security is also a key concern; in fact, history shows us that all software stacks have security bugs, which will need to be patched after deployment and therefore the ability to update software/firmware ‘over-the-air’ (OTA) for long-lived lifetime of industrial IoT devices is essential.”
DevicePilot CEO Pilgrim Beart, said: “Using standards, which are entirely open and compatible with Internet Protocol allows easy re-use and integration of all components in the chain, from the edge device, through the gateway to cloud services, while also enabling end-to-end security. This brings huge efficiencies to vendor and customer alike, finally delivering the win-win benefits long promised by IoT”.
He added: “A huge amount of ‘care-and-feeding’ surrounds every IoT application and in our experience, this can often consume some 80 percent of the overall effort. This extra work includes setting-up and managing connectivity, security, monitoring, provisioning and code upgrades.
“In the past, manufacturers have implemented these functions in a proprietary way, which had the side effect of locking the application into a closed silo, so no part of it could easily be used by third-parties or supplied by third-parties. This lock-in was dangerous for the customer and inefficient for the vendor and the need to translate between proprietary edge protocols and the cloud created real security vulnerabilities.”
