Avoid re-inventing the wheel to get IoT rolling

451 Research traces parallels in current IoT innovations with the evolution of enterprise mobility towards full maturity. They suggest enterprises can avoid reinventing the wheel by using existing back-end integration platforms and IT infrastructure.

Enterprise mobility market analysts, Brian Partridge and Chris Marsh, of 451 Research, have predicted that the next four years can see leading enterprises making use of converged back-end platforms for enterprise mobility and the Internet of Things (IoT) to ease the management overhead involved in governing apps and internet-connected devices.

They argue that convergence of mobility and IoT is necessary to ease organizational management challenges, as well as to enable taking advantage of continued evolution in enterprise IT architecture, including the focus on system-wide security, API-driven microservices, open source, cloud and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) delivery models, big data, and analytics.

In the 451 Research Pathfinder paper, “Making the case for converging enterprise mobility and IoT digital initiatives,” sponsored by Red Hat, the authors write, “In 2017 and beyond, IoT and EM [enterprise mobility] digital initiatives will mature as it becomes clear that the vast number of common platform requirements and goals creates an opportunity for convergence.”¹

The need for standardization

One of the challenges for any new field is balancing standardization with innovation. This can be especially true for domains such as IoT that involve distributed systems built with components from multiple vendors.

Similar to mobile, IoT has the potential to reshape enterprise IT, but with so many players in the ecosystem, open standards and interoperability are needed to make it work. In networking, for example, TCP/IP beat out other competing protocols because it was chosen as the industry standard. We anticipate IoT will follow a similar path.

Once a standard has been agreed upon and implemented, we anticipate that organisations will invest in advanced mobilisation of a broader set of assets and back-end data sets. Open, interoperable mobile application platforms are expected to play an important role in enabling this mobilisation.

To avoid lock-in, we would caution against using proprietary IoT interfaces. Physical connectivity should be built on existing standards like Ethernet, WiFi, RS-485, and Bluetooth. Emerging standards like the IPv6-based 6LoWPAN can also be considered.

Similarly, enterprise IoT developers would be wise to incorporate standard network protocols such as TCP or UDP and IPv4 or IPv6. Note that IPv6 is the foundation of the emerging 6LoWPAN mesh networks.

APIs for IoT: a familiar face

451 Research has outlined the advantages of converging enterprise mobility and IoT initiatives and included the benefit of tapping into the evolution towards API-driven microservices. There are multiple ways to construct APIs, ranging from complex structures and calling interfaces to simple key/value pairs. IoT lends itself to message passing interfaces which only require connectivity and communications when there are data or commands to exchange.

IoT device communications tend to use message passing with key/value pairs. The advantage of this approach is that it makes use of a standard communications infrastructure to support a wide range of use cases. What is required for a new device is to determine what information and commands it needs to exchange, then define the key and define the data.  While the applications need to understand the keys and values they are working with, everything else related to connectivity and communications is based on the common communications infrastructure.

Standard functions can use a common keyword, while custom data for a single device can be indicated by a custom key, which specific applications would understand and other applications could ignore. Using standard interfaces, an IoT device could be extended to add this new data.

Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) and Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) are two of the most promising protocols for IoT. Both of these are lightweight message protocols designed for low power use cases usually associated with IoT devices.

Connectivity and communications are handled by the standard infrastructure, such as MQTT over Bluetooth LE. Applications can work directly with the MQTT data. Additionally, an IoT Gateway can bridge MQTT or CoAP messages to an enterprise message bus like JBoss A-MQ. This helps connect IoT to applications running in a datacentre or in the cloud and provides a familiar interface to application developers.

Conclusion:

As the 451 Research analysts anticipate, enterprise IoT may follow a similar maturation path to that followed by enterprise mobility, where many tactical app deployments can lead to fully implemented mobile app strategies supported by back-end integration with existing IT infrastructure.

In the future, we anticipate that enterprise mobility platforms will evolve to support IoT initiatives as true innovations and business use cases emerge. The enterprise focus will be on facilitating back-end integration; strengthening security; DevOps and increasing agility in the application development lifecycle; data analytics; PaaS and IT infrastructure. CIOs will play a key role in guiding their organizations on how to implement IoT applications within the overall digital strategy, while also delivering greater security and compliance measures for a host of newly-connected devices.