One by one the giants of patent fees and proprietary platforms have succumbed to the open source wave. Microsoft launched its shared source initiative in 2003, only two years after CEO Steve Ballmer labelled it ‘un-American’ and a ‘cancer’. IBM invested $1bn in Linux back in 2000 (and committed a further $1bn) this year, and has contributed many projects such as the Eclipse framework. Even the doyen of patent ownership, Qualcomm, included open source in its model when it set up a separate unit, the Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) in 2009. These companies are not just responding to the challenge from the Linux/web firms which grew up with open source. They have recognized that, provided the ‘open’ projects are firmly under their direction, they can deliver greater returns and industry influence than closed platforms. That thinking is very clear in the formation of AllSeen, a Linux Foundation-hosted technology based entirely on Qualcomm’s AllJoyn, the most important output from QuIC so far.
This aims to become the standard ‘glue’ to end fragmentation within the internet of things, allowing all those billions of devices and sensors to discover one another, and communicate, regardless of protocol or operating system. Its aim is to establish ‘a common lingua on top of the base peer-to-peer connectivity that the software enables’, as the chip provider puts it ‘ enabling an open ecosystem of IoT devices and apps, but with Qualcomm’s technology acting as the unifier. There are many other candidates to provide a universal middleware for the IoT, not least Oracle’s Java, but Qualcomm knows AllJoyn has a better chance if it is seen as an open project. And if it succeeds, the chip giant will see a technology which it still controls becoming a key enabler of the interoperable IoT ‘ adding immeasurably to the firm’s reach and influence. As CEO Paul Jacobs put it, ‘we’re trying to create the common language for the internet of everything’.
‘We want to eliminate the concern over the transport layer,’ said Qualcomm president Rob Chandhok. ‘It’s like what HTTP and HTML did for the web. It didn’t matter if you had Ethernet or Wi-Fi or what physical layers. Everyone could build for the web.’
Of course, this is a huge change in the usual Qualcomm business model of licensing the technologies it develops in secretive but highly lucrative patent deals. It is unclear whether it is retaining patents related to AllJoyn, and whether it might charge for them, but the basic platform itself was created by the open source division and has been donated in full to be hosted by the Foundation and licensed under the open source ISC licence. This, of course, is essential to achieve mass uptake, since few companies would willingly expose themselves to Qualcomm’s patent lawyers if they don’t have to. And mass uptake could see AllJoyn turning up in all kinds of products which Qualcomm’s silicon might not touch, allowing the company to sit spider-like at the center of a huge ecosystem web.
For instance, AllJoyn taps into an initiative which Qualcomm announced in 2011, to release applications programming interfaces (APIs) to give web apps deeper links into its hardware. The APIs would be exposed directly into the browser, boosting performance and making the choice of OS less relevant, helping to drive cross-platform apps. Qualcomm hopes that, in an open source environment, more third parties will build on top of AllJoyn, creating add-ons such as a lighting control code, thermostat controls and user interfaces, and other common connected devices.
As well as influence, this open source approach can lead to hard revenues too, in terms of services driven by the wide adoption of the open source platform. Google certainly understood that with Android, and a decade ago, IBM proclaimed that, by 2003, it was making twice as much revenue from Linux related services as from patent licensing ‘ only three years after biting the open source bullet.
Qualcomm has always had a certain number of services activities, in which it manages objects connected to wireless networks ‘ including its very first business, Omnitracs, which provided tracking and messaging services for long distance trucks. That was sold this year after 28 years, but is the obvious ancestor of the M2M and IoT management services which mobile players are so keen to offer.
The firm will also have its own products based on AllJoyn. The company stresses that it is important for it to embed its software innovations in real chips and devices, because ‘we monetize through hardware’. The first was AllPlay, a hardware/software media streaming product, and then came the experimental smartwatch, called Toq, which shipped recently. There have also been new chips from the Atheros division, providing a low power Wi-Fi platform for home appliances and consumer electronics, and eventually for IoT, which harnesses AllJoyn and supports applications as well as connectivity.
The other return is more indirect, but comes from making the IoT simpler and more interoperability, and therefore encouraging it to expand rapidly ‘ creating the large scale which is necessary to make the economics of embedded gadgets and chips add up. Choudhury commented: ‘It’s not altruistic that we are doing this and giving it away, it’s to drive interoperability for this next wave of connected devices. Our business thrives on consumers, so we need scale. And this proximal interoperability is critical to growing businesses into new segments and markets. If consumers do not value connectivity, they will not buy these new devices, and that hurts our bottom line, because we monetize through processors, whether cellular or wireless and Bluetooth.’
AllJoyn, then, is a big power play, but its success is by no means assured. The new AllSeen Alliance has succeeded in attracting 23 initial members. As well as Qualcomm itself, LG, white goods vendor Haier, Panasonic, Silicon Image and Wi-Fi router supplier TP-Link are the founding board members (at a cost of $300,000 each), while other backers include Cisco, HTC, Wilocity and Harman. But of course, there are some big gaps ‘ mobile web movers and shakers like Google, Apple and Microsoft, as well as heavyweights from the enterprise sector, where most real world IoT effort will take place in the first years.
The most concrete support came from Haier, the Chinese white goods maker, which has been very prominent in early IoT developments. Its director of standards and patents, Guodong Xue, said in a statement: “We are planning to implement the AllJoyn-based framework across our line of appliances’. This would signify the first real world adoption of AllJoyn outside Qualcomm’s own efforts, such as the Toq smartwatch.
AllSeen has the advantage of a technology which has been under development for several years and so already has a code base and has been showcased in products. The proximal peer-to-peer networking technology started as a convenient way for nearby handsets to communicate, but is being evolved into a fully fledged platform for all kinds of connected devices. Sy Choudhury, senior director of product management for the platform, said at a recent Qualcomm event that AllJoyn had evolved from a ‘smartphone app to smartphone app’ technology to be a communications system for other smart devices, and from 2014, for IoT appliances too.
The new group says it offers “a code base of various modular services that enable discovery of adjacent devices, pairing, message routing and security’. That code is available online for Windows, Android, iOS and various Linux distributions and embedded operating systems. It supports C++ and Java with support for C, C#, JavaScript, and ActionScript to come.
The next step will be to accelerate those future developments, widen the base of developer tools and reference designs, and organize workgroups for important new activities. The first will be to address issues of device discovery, network access, user notifications and audio streaming.
Like Intel, Cisco and others, Qualcomm talks in sweeping terms about IoT, but in reality knows that, for commercial purposes, it needs to select a few specific targets first and build up its base step-by-step. Its choices reflect the positioning of its core chips ‘ like Snapdragon, AllJoyn will address home multimedia applications first. Its first real IoT focus, for next year, is home automation, while it is carrying out R&D in areas such as automotive, but without commercial plans until after 2014, although some AllSeen partners may extend it more rapidly to new segments under their own projects.
AllJoyn is being constantly augmented, and will be more rapidly now by the open source community ‘ the other great economic reason why large firms have embraced openness. Most recently Qualcomm added a common way to perform certain key tasks, such as sending and receiving notifications across devices, to enable multivendor interoperability, as a clear step towards making the technology standards-ready.
The formation of AllSeen is just the first step in trying to leap ahead of the many other IoT standardization efforts. Some of these are coming from real standards bodies like 6LoWPAN; some from government initiatives, like the US’s Industrial Internet group, led by GE.
As Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation’s executive director said, “There have been attempts to solve this interoperability challenge the old-fashioned way. Some vendors have tried to corner the market with proprietary solutions ‘ a crippling contradiction when the basic requirement of the internet of everything is interoperability across vendors and brands. At the same time, standards setting initiatives have cropped up but they’re inefficient when, say, every company that makes a tiny light switch needs to implement a 500-page technical spec.”
So there are advantages to open initiatives, even if these are driven by vendors looking for political and commercial advantage. There will certainly be plenty of those. Oracle has a big chance to be an IoT driver thanks to its ownership of Java, while Intel and Samsung have already discussed their own frameworks for IoT middleware ‘ and Google, Sony and others will not be far behind, whether they aim for global standards, or to create a closed ecosystem around their own platforms.
Some of the results will be complementary to AllSeen. IBM is hard at work at protocol and cloud level; and last month, Samsung described SAMI, a kind of Siri for ‘things’.
Others, like Java, will be direct alternatives. Mobile Java was the first real open handset software platform, and it remains essential to millions of low end mobile devices today. Its owner Oracle wants to give it a similar role in the IoT, providing the unifying layer to bring together so many diverse elements.
Controlling that layer and its resulting ecosystem would give Oracle considerable power in the IoT space, going some way to compensating for the gradual decline of Java’s influence in handsets. In September, the database provider rolled out the latest release of Java Micro Edition Embedded, positioning it as a platform to unify diverse real time OSs and protocols, it could see other contenders for that role. Oracle is promising a Java-based services delivery platform, initially supporting a new family of gateways from Freescale, and will also run Java on microcontrollers from Freescale, Qualcomm, STMicro and others.
Oracle and Freescale will co-develop a platform for service providers based on Java and the Freescale Kinetis, i.MX and QorIQ processors. The first elements of that platform are gateway reference designs, under the One Box label, targeting specific IoT sectors. One Box is an appliance with a Java software stack, which can communicate with sensors running Java Embedded via any of the main protocols in use in IoT. The box handles some of the real time data processing and sends other data to the cloud to be handled there. The initial versions are targeted at home energy and healthcare, two of the most promising first generation IoT applications, and run on i.MX 6 chips.
Whether Java, AllJoyn or something else prevails, there will be winners and losers. As with any unifying layer, there is a threat to players which make their money from building apps and hubs manually and one-by-one, and to those few which have sufficient consumer power to harmonize the interoperability of many different devices around their own proprietary framework (Apple). But if even Qualcomm is embracing open source, there seems little life left in such approaches.
“We’re at this place where people are trying to do everything vertically because they don’t see another solution, and the alliance is saying ‘here’s a big honking piece of functionality Qualcomm is willing to give away’,'” Chandhok told The Verge. “It’s a huge problem that needs to be solved. It simply makes no sense for everybody to keep reinventing by themselves over and over.”
The AllSeen alliance:
The full line-up of AllSeen is:
Board members – Qualcomm, Haier, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Sharp, Silicon Image and TP-Link
Other members: Canary, Cisco Systems, D-Link, doubleTwist, Fon, Harman, HTC, Letv, LIFX, Lite-on, Moxtreme, Musaic, Sears, Sproutling, The Sprosty Network, Weaved and Wilocity.
Bluetooth gets IoT update:
The latest software update for Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) will enable a supporting device to act as a hub in the internet of things, not just a peripheral. The idea is to make it easier to use for connected gadgets which will not pair with a smartphone but need to link directly.
Bluetooth 4.1 was approved this week by its SIG (special interest group), and also promises IPv6 support and better data rates.
The new version, which comes as an over-the-air software upgrade, has been tweaked to avoid interference with LTE radios, something which could become an issue as more Bluetooth devices are used as companions with smartphones and tablets.
There will be a better sleep-wake cycle for the radio that will allow the devices to connect without user intervention; and bulk data transfer will happen at higher rates (though these were not specified).
Finally, Bluetooth devices will receive a dedicated channel allowing them to talk directly to the internet via IPv6, though as many analysts pointed out, the SIG needs to explain better how that can be done without sacrificing battery life.