Steve Rogerson talks with Philip Hooker from Software AG about the Thin.Edge.io project and the upcoming IMC IoT Days Fall conference

One of the ongoing problems with any major installation is making it both secure and easy to manage. That challenge is one that has always faced industrial applications as factories seek to modernise their operations and yet not leave themselves vulnerable to attack.

Given the expense and potential disruption of bringing new equiopment into such a setting, this technology has to be reliable and still robust a decade or so into the future. And talking of expense, nobody wants to spend more than they need but yet they still want the best features that are available. It can be a tricky balance.

Philip Hooker, vice president for strategic programmes at Software AG, says these product manufacturers need three simple things: secure cloud and hardware agnostic connectivity; robust device management and monitoring; and low CPU and memory efficient operation on resource constrained devices. He will be discussing this and how the open source Thin-Edge.io initiative is delivering open IoT connectivity to a new wave of cloud agnostic lightweight embedded devices at the IoT Days Fall 2021 online event being organised by the IoT M2M Council on 23 September.

I caught up with Philip and asked him about the Thin-Edge.io initiative and the message he hopes to get across in his talk.

“The aim is to connect any IoT platform that can be hosted on any hardware platform using any language,” he said. “That provides a large amount of choice. You can leverage the framework to provide the connectivity. It simplifies connectivity and provides connections to external assets.”

Though Software AG is a major contributor to this work, the goal is for it to be an industry agnostic collaborative project for developing resource constrained edge devices. The other partners are IFM, Adamos, Nexus, Mosquitto and Inetum.

“We are a lead contributor to this,” said Hooker, “but it is not owned by us.”

He said using IoT to solve one problem could be quite straightforward but when this was scaled up to a more inclusive system it got more complex. Making this straightforward is the prime goal of the project.

“We are not in the early days of IoT and M2M anymore,” he said. “Most enterprises have some capabilities. They have gone through the early periods of knowing what they need and are looking at how to make these work more effectively in their business.”

He said manufacturers want to focus on the areas that differentiate their products and not have to deal with the “plumbing”.

The first preview from the open-source project came out in March and Hooker said they were starting to build up traction.

The IoT Days Fall 2021 event will take place over four days and will focus on the real-life results that can be had from implementing IoT for connecting remote devices. Industry use-cases to be discussed will include facilities and asset management, emergency first-responder services, and supply chain management.

Track one on 16 September will deal with maintaining facilities and other operating assets as they move beyond simple monitoring and alarming into predictive maintenance. The second track on 20 September will look at how IoT technology is saving lives and property while cutting response costs for government agencies responding to crises.

Also on 20 September, the third track will discuss the incremental costs of securing devices and networks and ask about the alternatives. And, finally, on 23 September, the fourth track, at which Philip Hooker will be speaking, will talk about how product manufacturers are now providing services, and entirely new services are being born thanks to connected devices.

More details can be found here: https://www.iotm2mcouncil.org/iot-library/event/imc-events/imcs-iot-days-fall-2021/