A new industry collaboration has been set up among leading Internet of Things (IoT) businesses and experts to help develop interoperable IoT components for the cloud.
Bosch Software Innovations, Eurotech and Red Hat are among the first businesses to take part in the collaboration, which will aid the creation of cloud platforms and IoT products.
It will become a part of the Eclipse IoT working Group, a partnership consisting of 26 open-source IoT projects and companies supported by the Eclipse Foundation.
Platform components have become popular in the IoT industry because they provide capabilities useful for companies developing and managing connected tech solutions.
New IoT solutions for cloud
Normally, these components are used to enable secure, reliable communication between devices, manage and update hardware, and integrate information into applications.
There are also instances where they’re delivered as services on cloud infrastructure platforms. Cloud Foundry and OpenShift are good examples.
While the collaboration has only just been set up, it’s already developing solutions for the industry. Eclipse Kapua is one of these, and has already been released.
This gives IoT companies and developers access to a core integration framework and a set of modular components for device registry, device management, routing and data management.
Connecting the dots
The collaboration’s partners are working on their own solutions too. Bosch Software Innovations is helping to pioneer Eclipse Hono, a project that supposedly enables safe communication between IoT devices.
This will eventually be integrated into Kapua as an extension. It’s expected that other open-source projects and commercial vendors will be able to create integrations for Kapua and Hono, leading to the creation of an ecosystem.
Parallel to this, GE Digital has just joined the Eclipse Foundation and has proposed the idea of a project that implements a granular access control framework so that IoT developers can integrate access control security into their IoT applications.
Open-source route
Dr. Stefan Ferber, VP of engineering at Bosch Software Innovations, said: “Bosch is a major industrial IoT company that supports a wide range of devices, in many different industries, such as automotive, manufacturing and home appliances.
“We believe the best way to support this complex environment is to base our commercial IoT platform, the Bosch IoT Suite, on open source components and open standards.
“These projects establish a horizontal open technology for IoT and provide the technical breeding grounds for successful business ecosystems.”
James Kirkland, chief architect for IoT at Red Hat: “To best address the complexity of industrial IoT, solutions and infrastructure providers must maintain a high level of collaboration, which is really only sustainable through an open source community.
“The Eclipse Kapua project, started by joint work between Red Hat and Eurotech, provides this open and transparent community approach and aims to help solve the complexities of the IoT by providing the required level of interoperability, scale, and flexibility in open IoT platforms.”