Simplifying M2M

By Brian Vezza

Today Wind River is taking a significant step forward in simplifying machine-to-machine (M2M) development for our customers.  We announced the Wind River Intelligent Device Platform which builds upon Wind River’s operating system and tools leadership with M2M middleware to make it easier to design, build, and operate M2M or smart connected devices.

As I’ve written before, M2M devices require a range of capabilities including connectivity, manageability, and security among others.  The complexity and fragmentation in this space makes it much more difficult than it should be for the industry to reach its potential.  Designing products with a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) approach is tough and an M2M software platform makes a lot of sense.  After all, why recreate the wheel connecting, securing, and managing devices from scratch when you can make use of a software platform for these foundational capabilities and focus on your differentiators instead? 

Wind River Intelligent Device Platform starts with our embedded Linux and Workbench tool suite and adds on M2M middleware.  We’re making connectivity easier with a range of options including cellular, WiFi, ZigBee, and Ethernet among others.  Securing devices and data is now more powerful with Secure Remote Management (SRM).  Secure Remote Management works with hardware capabilities to enable a secure or trusted boot and a secure management connection.  If you aren’t 100% certain that you are managing the device you think you are talking to, that’s a real problem and SRM helps here.  Remote device manageability is a fragmented space with many different standards and a lot of DIY.  Wind River is working with best-in-class ecosystem partners to offer integrated and supported manageability middleware including OMA DM, TR-069, OSGi, and JVM.  Also, our platform is compatible with Intel’s newly introduced Intelligent Systems Framework.  This will help ensure M2M devices are fully integrated into broader Intelligent Systems from devices to data centers effectively.

It’s important to take the long-view with M2M as shortcuts today can cause numerous issues down the road with quality, longevity of the solution, support costs, operations issues, software updates, emerging standards, and supply chain complexity all being important.  M2M still is complex, but it’s getting a whole lot easier as Wind River continues our 30 plus years of working with customers on the toughest embedded challenges and opportunities.  I’ll be speaking about “Accelerating Machine-to-Machine Device Growth Through Embedded Software Development” at the Intel Developer Forum this week and will go into much more detail on these topics.  Together with our partners and customers we’re starting to crack the complexity of M2M, speed time-to-market, reduce total cost of ownership, and accelerate adoption.  We look forward to meeting with you at IDF and beyond to discuss this exciting space!

 

 

For additional information from Wind River, visit us on Facebook.

Comments

[Jan Tångring]

Blogging to promote is a great idea. But you have to give us something beyond the press release. Am I wasting valuable time subscribing to this source?

- Jan Tångring, etn.se