Join Qualcomm, Oracle and Gemalto to discuss the direction of Java for connected devices on Thursday Dec 12. https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/479265263
Oracle, Gemalto and V2Com capture best IoT Application at the recent IDTechEx event.
Delivering Flexible Smart Grid Solutions for Latin America.
The growth of the Internet of Things opens up all types of service driven opportunities, delivering increased efficiencies, better customer value and improved quality of life. Realizing the full potential of the Internet of Things requires that we change how we view and build devices which provide the core foundation of services: rapidly transforming data to information to value. From home to industry to public sector, the focus is on how devices can grow in intelligence, interoperability with other devices, systems and services, and drive timely decisions, while delivering real business return for all.
Please be sure to check out this interesting Oracle webcast with partner Freescale as they discuss how all of the players in the IoT and M2M value chain can drive value from the new wave of data coming from intelligent connected devices by leveraging Java.
The webcast will be held on Thursday Dec 5 at 10am PST/1pm EST and includes a live q&a session.
The applications technology landscape surrounding the Internet of Things, also called machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, is a Wild West full of proprietary technology implementations and a highly fragmented vendor ecosystem. Java enables a standards-based platform to enable highly integrated end-to-end device-to-data-center solutions. This session outlines some of the key challenges service providers face today in developing, scaling, and extending end-to-end M2M architectures. With the help of sample architectural blueprints and reference use cases, the session elaborates on the benefits of using Java Embedded in combination with Java middleware products in effectively addressing these challenges.
I've barely scratched the surface with the above list. There are many more sessions that'll focus on IoT as a central topic. And there will be many other sessions that the IoT audience might find interesting. For a comprehensive list, go to the JavaOne 2013 Content Catalog and filter by the "Edge Computing in Java in Embedded, Smart Card and IoT Applications" track.
See you at JavaOne 2013!
IoT, as described before, is a complex value chain that involves multiple stakeholders ranging from semiconductor manufacturers, sensors and gateway manufacturers, network providers, software vendors system integrators and many more. An independent research study by Beecham Research emphasizes the need for coordination across partners in this value chain to be a topmost priority in the IoT platform.
Here's another
interesting session at Oracle Open World,2013 that attempts to provide insight into the role of Oracle
Fusion Middleware in the IoT platform. Find out how Oracle's Java Embedded Technologies with Oracle Fusion Middleware can provide a standardized platform to develop and deploy applications across multiple devices and data centers. Application scenarios where solutions have been successfully deployed will also be presented. Infotech, a location intelligence company based in Turkey, uses this platform to offer a range of location based services. The CEO of Infotech explains how Oracle Fusion Middleware was leveraged for its solutions.
Session Details are as follows -
Speakers: Ali Peker - CEO, INFOTECH Bilisim ve Iletisim Teknolojileri A.S | Ed Zou - VP, Product Management, Fusion Middleware, Oracle | Shivanshu Upadhyay - Solution Architecture Director, Oracle
Session Abstract: Only Oracle delivers a comprehensive platform for the entire machine-to-machine (M2M) architecture. The key to gaining real business value from M2M services or, more broadly, the Internet of Things is effective communication among all elements of the architecture. With an integrated, end-to-end platform, it is possible to deploy applications faster, process and analyze data at lightning speeds, and act on events as quickly as they occur. This presentation looks at the Oracle device-to-data-center platform and how Oracle Fusion Middleware, the leading business innovation platform for the enterprise and the cloud, enables partners to create and run agile, intelligent M2M applications.
Here's a highlight of an interesting session on Internet of Things around Oracle's Open World.
The Internet of Things (IoT) platform provides simple, scalable and cost-effective means to enable organizations manage and analyze large volumes of device data throughout its lifecycle - collection to analysis. Canon is an interesting example which illustrates such a use-case. As a leader in office equipment business, Canon deals with processing numerous events-per-second in real-time to manage its multi-function printers (MFPs).
Find out how Oracle's IoT platform has enabled Canon to meet some of its challenges in scalability, performance and proactive maintenance of its MFPs.
Session Details are as follows -
Speakers: Harish Gaur, Director Product Management, Oracle | Dennis Amorosano - Sr. Director, Canon U.S.A., Inc
Session Abstract: As more devices become intelligent, governments as well as companies ranging from utilities and healthcare to the automotive industry are exploring ways to leverage data coming from devices to optimize processes, create differentiated offerings, and derive new revenue streams. However, there are many challenges as organizations take on M2M projects such as connecting with numerous devices, managing a tremendous amount of data from them, ensuring end-to-end security, integrating with applications, and coordinating with players along the value chain. This session covers the Oracle Internet of Things platform for connection devices—a common platform for building M2M solutions—and how customers are using it.
Oracle has been one of the leading providers of framework and technology to make our cities smarter. This picture shows some of the thinking around this. It is interesting to note that Internet of Things has the potential to make our cities "smarter" as is evident from projects our partners are engaged in. If I look at major constituents described in this picture and pick where "connected devices" or "embedded sensors" are creating most value, I will pick Healthcare, Public Safety, Transportation, and Utilities. The value add is both in modernizing the city infrastructure and streamlining city operations. Let us look at the possibilities based on some successful implementations.
1) Healthcare - Many patients who require constant health monitoring prefer the comfort of at-home health care monitoring to costly and inconvenient hospital care. This has huge potential to take out cost from our healthcare systems. The main difficulty with home health care is enabling patients to provide accurate and timely data to health care professionals. This is being changed through Java based Gateways like Digi/Freescale Home Health Hub (HHH) platform. The value Java Embedded adds here is to provide a platform to seamlessly connect with ever increasing healthcare devices like blood pressure devices, pulse oximeters etc. and APIs to create a display interface to monitor connected devices and see results from the gateway itself.
2) Public Safety - The successful use of surveillance cameras in the recent past to identify suspects after an incident bolsters the case of using these at many locations. Low priced sensors can be put at more locations. However the challenge remains to sift through overwhelming amount of data and identify “events” of interest. This becomes more difficult if this has to happen real time to prevent incidents rather than analyze afterwards. One successful use of Real Time Event processing which has been implemented is in Emergency Response systems. During national disasters or emergencies, EADS products play key roles from the opening moments through every stage of the response. EADS used Oracle Event Processing along with other technologies in their Emergency Response System to prevent resources from entering an exclusion zone to limit damage.
3) Transportation – Logistics companies like UPS have long realized the benefits of Telematics to optimally plan the route of their vehicles. They are now also using sensor data from vehicles to perform maintenance on each vehicle only when required, as opposed to on a set schedule. It is about time that our cash strapped Public Transportation departments start realizing some of the same benefits to make real time changes to schedules based on actual demand. This has started happening in many counties. Italian Public Transportation company COTRAL implemented a monitoring system to plan and make changes to routes of their buses based on real time information being gathered using a Telematic control Unit on the Buses. Oracle products were used to do spatial analysis and visualization of data coming in from the buses in context with other route planning data.
Another area where Transportation is impacted is Traffic Management. San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency has an ambitious project to manage demand and supply of parking spots in city of San Francisco towards the goal of reducing unnecessary traffic to find parking spots. One important way to achieve this was to use parking sensor data to provide availability information to drivers on mobile application. The sensor data is also used for determining pricing based on real time demand.
4) Utilities – IoT can impact Utilities (Electricity, Gas, Water, Waste management) in two main areas - (i) Smart Metering that enables utilities to remotely collect customers meter data at frequent intervals (~15 mins) has the potential to become smarter. (ii) SCADA (Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition) Systems can increasingly automate regular use and repair of utilities operations network. Let’s examine this in more detail in a future post.
If you are interested in Internet of Things (IoT) or Machine to Machine (M2M) and is going to Oracle OpenWorld and OPN Exchange this list is very useful as it lists all the sessions covering the topic.
Focus On Internet of Things (IoT) & M2M
Looking forward to see you there!
<<Andy>>
Internet of Things brings tremendous promise to integrate every smart “thing” in this world. Having been an integration practitioner for more than decade, I find it hard to resist drawing a parallel between these 2 worlds: the world of integration & the world of Internet of Things.
- IoT market is Wild Wild West - fragmented, full of competing standards & proprietary solutions - exactly where integration was in 90s before SOA, webServices & XML redefined the landscape. ETSI is doing significant work to unify different standardization efforts and Oracle is actively contributing to this effort. But, there is lot of ground to be covered.
- Smart things i.e. sensing devices, medium powered gateways represent the IoT endpoints. This is akin to B2B integration scenario where cloud apps, B2B apps etc are communicating with the integration platform. Of course, we are now talking about hundreds to even millions of devices sending data to an enterprise versus a handful of apps in a traditional integration project
- There are wide range of devices supporting different interfaces, communication protocols and lack interoperability. It’s virtually impossible for any vendor to provide connectivity solution to entire breed of current and emerging devices. Before enterprise applications started becoming service enabled, we all grappled with the challenge of dealing with myriad of applications exposing their functionality through proprietary interfaces.
List could go on and on. But, it makes one think whether a service oriented approach could be considered when building an IoT application. Before we apply service oriented principles to IoT architecture, we should acknowledge the fact that IoT does bring its unique set of challenges
- Security: How do I ensure that data in motion (traveling between devices, gateways, network to enterprise apps/cloud) or data at rest is secured?
- Identity – Device is the new data source. But, there is no human associated with a M2M device unlike an enterprise app or a mobile. This makes it challenging for enterprises to manage the device lifecycle - onboard/off board new devices and manage their identity
- Device Management: How do I remotely manage and monitor a device throughout its lifecycle (diagnostics, troubleshooting, configuration)?
- Analytics: IoT will lead to data deluge. Enterprises would need to think beyond traditional business intelligence tools. How do I analyze IoT data at real-time (i.e. is there a medical emergency based on data received from blood pressure monitor?) to how data is analyzed for historical & predictive analytics (How do I improve patient care based on medical trends from patients over past 6 months)?
In a typical SOA Composite application, we have collection of business processes, business services, data services with each layer building on top of the other to enable loosely coupled integration. Data services expose application interfaces as services which could in turn be orchestrated together to create a business service. E.g. “Create Employee Record” Data Service is responsible for creating a new record in Fusion HCM application, while “Onboard Employee” business service would orchestrate several steps (read data services) needed to on-board a new employee (create employee record, provision new email account etc).
">Figure 1: Layered SOA Architecture
IoT architecture could essentially be modeled in a similar layered format. Device layer, at the bottom, is the main source of data. It includes sensing/edge devices which sense the surrounding environment and transmit data in regular intervals. These sensors, in turn, may interact with an intelligent gateway. Gateway provides data aggregator and in few cases device level data processing capabilities. Data is funneled through a communication service provider network. CSP could either play the role of the network provider or it could move up the value chain to offer IoT infrastructure services. This layer would enable seamless connectivity with different M2M devices (akin to data services in SOA) and offer the ability to remotely monitor and manage them for device connectivity.
IOT services layer is completed agnostic of underlying
devices, communication protocols and connectivity semantics. This layer would
include core set of services to build IoT applications (i.e. composite
applications)
- Analyze data at real-time (event processing)
- Act on M2M data & events (integration service)
- Enable historical, real-time and predictive
analytics (Analytics Services)
- Visualize operational and analytical data
through mobile/desktop (UI Services)
- Manage data security & identity of
devices/apps (Security & Identity Management Service)
- 
- Figure 2: Layered IoT Architecture
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Oracle IoT platform enables this service oriented approach to building IoT applications. Listen to this webcast replay how Oracle customers have leveraged Oracle IoT stack to build applications for smart city, home automation, industrial automation and e-health.
Internet Of Things (IoT)