Simply put: “things” generate petabytes of data. Putting sensors on everything, as both Cisco and GE propose, creates a data nightmare. Hadoop has made analyzing big volumes of data much easier but what happens when you want to share a small sliver of that information with a customer or partner? After all, the purpose of “Big Data” collection is not altruism – it’s about monetization. In many situations, this will only be possible if data can be shared easily.

A Data Lens gives IoT data owners – such as manufactures or telco carriers – an easy and secure way to share a focused and billable data set with their customers and partners. Anything outside of the scope of a Data Lens cannot be accessed, whereas anything inside the lens is  “in focus”. The data in focus can be raw or aggregated. There can be any number of Data Lenses on a data set. They can be used internally or shared securely with external partners and customers. Data access through individual Data Lenses can be governed by service level agreements and – through metering – monetized.

For manufacturers and network operators looking at ways to share focused data slices from their Big Data, a Data Lens solves a big problem. By leveraging the Layer 7 API Gateway’s unique ability to focus on small data sets inside larger ones and to present these data sets as secure APIs, customized to specific customers or partners, it’s possible for IoT operators to drive new revenue from their Big Data.

1. There’s just so much of it that it’s easy to lose sight of the byte-sized trees in the petabyte-sized forest

2. It’s locked away in every recess of the enterprise – from applications to relational databases, to non-relational databases, to in-memory caches, public clouds, Hadoop clusters etc.

Data growth and diversity have made data access harder. But data access is the foundation of mobile app development, anything to do with the Internet of Things (IoT) and all kinds of Big Data analytics. Given this need for data in the face of access complexity, it didn’t come as a total surprise to see some of the most innovative Layer 7 customers start using our API Gateway technology as a novel data access, aggregation and presentation solution. As our resident IoT expert Holger Reinhardt pointed out to me: they are using our products to build highly-customized “lenses” across their distributed data backends. To me, this characterization is perfect because what these customers are looking for is perspective on their data. A lens gives perspective with focus.

Now, a Layer 7 API Gateway is more than just a data integration solution. Our technology has several unique features that make it ideal for collecting, composing and presenting data. First, we can talk to all kinds of data sources natively. That wasn’t easy to achieve and it’s something we developed over many years. Second, we can represent the source data as a RESTful API. Even better, we can dynamically generate a virtual API view for a specific user, app, partner etc. The API then becomes the entry point for accessing the aggregated data. Third, we can add fine-grained access and protection policies that ensure only authorized consumers get visibility to specific slices of data, while also protecting the data sources from attack and misuse. When combined, these capabilities give organizations a way to focus on just the information that is relevant to a particular mobile, IoT or Big Data analytics project and then share selectively with an app, cloud service, developer or partner.

A data lens is born!

If you want to learn more about our Data Lens solution, have a read of this new solution brief. Also, feel free to reach out to us with any questions.

So, are all these news stories about trillion-dollar business opportunities in IoT just stories? Most likely the truth is that no one has yet figured out how to make money with IoT but everyone wants to make sure that they are at least seen to have a plan – just in case it does take off. As if to prove this point, ZDnet made a very different assessment of M2M at MWC. I went into more detail on these issues during my recent interview with DeviceLine Radio.

Personally, I firmly believe in the disruptive potential for IoT. It will be disruptive because it will break down the separation between manufacturing industry on one side and IT industry on the other. Manufacturing companies like GE, Bosch and Siemens will increasingly see IT – and Big Data in particular – as a core competency they will need to master in order to sustain a competitive advantage. Simply outsourcing to IT companies will no longer suffice.

We can clearly see this developing as, for example, Bosch is readying its Internet Application Platform and GE is aggressively building out its Silicon Valley presence. At the same time IT companies are trying to position themselves as natural partners for manufactures or as integrators of smart things. Credit has to go to IBM, which has been pushing this trend as part of its Smarter Planet campaign, way ahead of other players.

Meanwhile, telecom carriers are also struggling to decide what IoT will mean for them. It’s easy to see how telecom’s core business can be seen as just a set of “dumb” data pipes. The challenge for this sector will be figuring out how to leverage its considerable assets, like cellular networks, global roaming and integrated billing, to create M2M business platforms. I think that Big Data analytics on the data piped through their network will have to be part of it.

It strikes me that there might be more to Cisco’s “Internet of Everything” (IoE) neologism than just a vendor’s attempt to brand what still may be a technology maverick. Internet of Everything sounds so much better than the common alternative when you append “Economy” to the end – and this is how it first appears in Chambers’ post. And that’s actually important because adding economy in the same breath is an acknowledgement that this isn’t just marketing opportunism as much as a recognition that, like mobility, the IoE could potentially be a great catalyst for independent innovation. In fact, Cisco’s white paper really isn’t about technology at all but is instead an analysis of the market potential represented in each emerging sector, from smart factories to college education.

It is exactly this potential for innovation – a new economy – that is exciting. The combination of Mobile Access and APIs was so explosive precisely because it combined a technology with enormous creative potential (APIs) with a irresistible business impetus (access to information outside the enterprise network). The geeks love enabling tools and APIs are nothing if not enabling; mobile just gives them something to build.

I0E, of course, is the ultimate business driver and –  with APIs as the enabler – it equals opportunity of staggering proportions. Like mobile before it – and indeed, social Web integration before that – IoE will come about precisely because the foundation of APIs already exists.

It is here where I disagree with some IoT pundits who advocate specialized protocols for optimizing performance. No thank you; it isn’t 1990 and opaque binary protocols no longer work for us, except when streaming large data sets (I’m looking at you, video).

Security in the IoE will be a huge issue and Cisco has this to say on the topic :

“IoE security will be addressed through network-powered technology: devices connecting to the network will take advantage of the inherent security that the network provides (rather than trying to ensure security at the device level).”

I agree with this because security coding is still just too hard and too easy to implement wrongly. One of the key lessons of mobile development is that we need to make it easy for developers to automatically enable secure communications. Take security out of the hands of developers, put it in the hands of dedicated security professionals and trust me, the developers will thank you.

As IoE extends to increasingly resource-constrained devices, the simpler we can make secure development, the better. Let application developers focus on creating great apps and a new economy will follow.

I’m particularly excited about a very ambitious EU-funded project to map an IoT reference architecture. Whether it will really become the reference architecture or simply a collection of best practices is subject to debate but I think the simple fact of trying to pull together all the different knowledge domains into one set of documents is bound to be interesting.

Forbes recently published an article by Alex Brisbourne called The Internet of Things Isn’t as New as It Seems. The article offers some really fascinating insights into the renewal rates for built-in 3G services in iPads and OnStar. Reflecting upon my own positive experiences with a 3G Kindle, I have to agree with Alex that, for connected devices to really reach their potential, connectivity must be simply built-in without requiring a separate subscription.

Another indication of this trend is the fact that car manufacturers are apparently switching from built-in mobile connectivity (requiring the owner to carry a subscription) to tethering off the driver’s existing smart phone. This highlights the challenges telco providers are facing – as summarized in a recent blog post on telco2.net.

Alex Bassi has provided another look at the way IoT is affecting business models, making the point that technology is enabling us to use things without having to own them. In my humble opinion, we’ll see this service-based model, which we normally associate with SaaS and the cloud, extending more and more into the domain of physical “smart” things. We can already see this usage pattern emerging in the automotive sector: car sharing a la Zipcar; limo service from Uber; electric car solutions from Better Place. FastCompany calls this the new “self-service” economy in an article that explores these issues in depth.

To get a good overview of the Internet of Things, I suggest heading over to ZDnet, which regularly posts articles on IoT and M2M. Postscapes, meanwhile, is completely dedicated to tracking IoT – I particularly like this site’s (currently incomplete) directory of companies in the space. There’s also a good collection of relevant essays gathered together on Bundlr.

Finally, here are a couple of links for the technically inclined. First here’s a presentation on the impressive set of open source building blocks developed as part of the m2m.eclipse.org project. Second is a piece that touches upon some technical aspects of the semantic Web that have a good deal of relevance to IoT. This is an area I’m personally very interested in and it might be a good topic to explore in a future post.

In any case, I expect to have plenty of interesting things to report on after Mobile World Congress. If you’re attending the show, be sure to stop by the Layer 7 booth for a chat. We’ll be at booth  #8.1A47 in the App Planet zone.

As usual, we’re likely to see a very broad sweep across various areas of telco innovation and mobile strategy but there are some fundamental questions facing the community and these will dominate many conference sessions, seminars and exhibits:

1. Connected Living
   As the Internet of Things gains momentum, how can the service provider community deliver the kind of enriched connectivity the broader ecosystem increasingly demands?
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2. Mobile Commerce
   For years, mobile has been a key banking and commerce tool for certain markets. With the rise of NFC (near field communication) and success stories like the Starbucks mobile payment app, will mobile become the preferred payment instrument for us all?
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3. Next-Generation Communications
   The world of communications moves quickly – too quickly even for service providers at times, with the runaway success of technologies of iMessage, WhatsApp and – next – WebRTC. In this ever-innovating world of mobile communications, can service providers regain some ground and demonstrate their value?

Layer 7 has answers to these questions and will be at MWC, demonstrating a variety of solutions that can help service providers address the challenges ahead. For example:

1. We have been collaborating with AT&T and have planned an M2M solution that will capture anonymous information about visitors as they move around the exhibition halls. This information will be presented as intelligent APIs via the Layer 7 platform.
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2. Security and authentication are very familiar terms to Layer 7 and we’ll be showing how mobile payments can be easily and securely integrated with a mobile app without compromising the user experience.
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3. “Communications as a Service” opens many opportunities for service providers and the new partnership between Layer 7 and Voxeo Labs will show how easy it can be to capitalize on these opportunities.

Come and meet the team at booth 8.1A47 in the App Planet zone or email info@layer7.com to schedule a meeting. See you there!

The good old measure of progress, mobile subscriber penetration, doesn’t cut it anymore. Now, the real measure is how many other connected devices a subscriber uses – iPads, Smart TVs and even fridges (who wouldn’t want a Galaxy Kitchen or an iPad Mini?) This is just the start of a revolution in connectivity, which will make it easier than ever to consume information and equally easy to emit a lot of information, often through social networks.

But there is another aspect to this – not only will you be able to post your own information but there will be all kinds of devices that can “sense” information about you. I expect to see a lot of this at MWC – sensors and cameras scattered around the floor, mapping passers-by to Facebook profiles and other personal information. Obviously, the capturing and cross pollination of this information raises all sorts of privacy issues.

It will also have a number of significant ramifications for mobile developers. First, there will be a new wealth of information available in the form of Web service APIs, as most of the data will be stored in cloud. The sheer scale of this new information-rich world will require apps to leverage cloud processing capabilities in order to be truly effective. This will create opportunities for enterprises to rethink their mobile architectures.

Second, mobile developers will need to use standard protocols for authentication and authorization. OAuth and OpenID Connect are key standards for protecting resources and allowing app users to authorize apps to leverage their information. Will these standards address all the privacy issues mentioned above? Probably not but they will make it a good deal easier for app developers to comply with privacy laws and regulations.

Third, the most successful app developers will be those that are able to provide a seamless user experience (UX) across multiple devices. This is because the end user of the near future will naturally expect all apps to know about other sessions that user had with an app across all of his or her many smart devices. Devs will therefore want to migrate sessions across devices, to bolster the UX.

If you’re going to MWC, come and say hello to the Layer 7 team. We will be located in the App Planet area Hall: 8.1 Booth: A47. I hope to see you there!

So, what is IoT? Depending on who you ask, you are likely to get different answers. I still like Adam Baumgarten’s original definition from 1999:  “If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things – using data they gathered without any help from us – we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best.”  In case you are still left wondering, here is a fitting visual.

What is driving this? The German philosopher Hegel (bear with me for a second) explained, in his book Science of Logic, that an accumulation of small quantitative change can lead to a much more profound change in quality. I think that the IoT is at a tipping point of this kind, with gradual changes in technologies and business models coming together to cause just such a leap in quality.

The last decade has seen the widespread adoption of SOA, ubiquitous connectivity, increasing commoditization of IT in the form of cloud computing, commoditization/miniaturization of hardware and big data analytics. Cost barriers to innovation have been eliminated or lowered dramatically through “as-a-service” business models. All these gradual advances are coming together to enable something new in scope, scale and ambition: the Internet of Things.

The good news is that IoT will not force us to unlearn everything we’ve been doing for the last couple of decades. Instead, what we have learned will need to be applied at a significantly larger scale. IoT will require highly scalable service-oriented, event-driven architectures.

I think the example of API Management for mobile provides a glimpse of the challenges ahead. Mobile Access to services will no longer happen just through apps built around Web-based standards and patterns. Increasingly, access will happen via embedded micro controllers using low-overhead pub-sub telemetry protocols like MQTT.

In this context, addressing access control, security, developer management, SLA enforcement, scalability, data integration, billing, analytics and device management will become more crucial than ever. Additionally, the sheer size of data “noise” might require edge analytics through adaptive event filtering and thresholding at the enterprise perimeter.

For a company like Layer 7, this future will hold plenty of opportunities to apply our experience in API Management, Mobile Access, SOA Governance and Cloud Integration. Our cloud-based APIfy platform is just the beginning of this journey. I have spent my career working on innovative technologies for the enterprise and I’m very excited to bring this experience – along with my ideas – to Layer 7, where we look forward to providing new and practical solutions for IoT.

The M2M paradigm presents an exciting new opportunity for companies to use Layer 7’s API Management products.  APIs represent the key to unlocking the value of M2M by linking devices in the field to the core enterprise applications that are able to analyze and apply the data these devices produce. Layer 7 empowers organizations to make that link in a secure, scalable way:

• The SecureSpan SOA Gateway or API Proxy provides REST-based connectivity to heterogeneous enterprise systems
• The Layer 7 API Portal allows M2M API owners to set and enforce SLAs and provide comprehensive information to API users (smart device developers, network operators)
• The Layer 7 OAuth Toolkit configures access control policies that are fit for M2M and able to leverage existing back-end infrastructure

We already have customers achieving M2M success in the automotive, healthcare, media and energy industries. So, whether you’re a logistics company looking to get a real-time view of your global fleet, a retailer needing to manage your disparate warehouses or a telecommunications company providing a broad set of M2M services, we encourage you to apply our industry-leading technology as part of your solution.

Read the solution brief: Simplify M2M Integration with a SOA Gateway