A company the size of IBM can easily be forgiven for having so many of its fingers in this many pies at once, and this week the technology giant is showing no letup in its need for extra digits – as it launches IBM developerWorks Recipes.
The program is designed to easily allow developers of all abilities to connect their IoT devices to the cloud, and to then use the data that those devices have transmitted. Conveniently, IBM happens to have a pretty successful cloud platform called Bluemix, which it launched last year following a six-month beta process.
The developerWorks Recipes use Bluemix to provide tutorials for embedding analytics and machine learning capabilities into their devices and applications, leveraging Bluemix’s integrated open-source tools and services – which now number over a hundred.
Last month, IBM launched developerWorks Open to help its participants develop open-source business software. Launched with over 50 available projects, most donated from IBM’s Research Labs, the code repository (think GitHub) should provide a few valuable head starts to companies looking to get involved.
IBM isn’t a stranger to open-source, and there is comfort to be found among adopters who know that they will be able to rely on continued access to the standard or protocol they adopt – without fear of its being shut down or sold off. Of course, if IBM starts contributing its Watson machine-learning arrays to the project, that argument becomes hard to make.
Although the source code might be open, a tiny startup isn’t going to be able to run the gargantuan Watson AI from their small offices, nor is a hobbyist. IBM is already implementing Watson in a few of the recipes, with one called Personality Insights gauging the content of a text entry to assess personality traits. Alchemy is another API that parses natural language into text – something that requires a lot of computational power, which is provided by IBM. In instances like this, it’s worth bearing in mind that ‘open’ often comes with strings attached in the IoT.
But the advanced hobbyists and startups appear to be a strong focus for the new developerWorks Recipes. These recipes are essentially parts of code that can be copied and tweaked to suit a purpose – saving a lot of legwork for those who might lack the necessary coding expertise.
Examples of potential developerWorks projects include automotive telematics via OBD-II diagnostics, real-time machinery condition monitoring, and trend identification via graphical representation using feeds from historical and real-time data.
Cloud platforms like Bluemix, and there are many other equivalents, are very important for IoT applications. Collecting data from a source and backhauling it to the cloud is the first step, which can involve an awful lot of very complex technology, but there is no value in the data you collect until you have done something with it, i.e. turned it into something useful.
For most users, this process takes the form of entering the reading into a database, and then using the tables to feed an application. That frontline data, most likely something like a status indicator or a meter reading, is then used to construct a representation of an environment – so that you could monitor the position of a fleet of vehicles, ambient temperatures in a factory, or the haul of a mining rig.
A number of businesses are already on board with developerWorks. MultiTech, Bitreactive, and u-blox have already pledged their support, with MultiTech’s Daniel Quant noting that the platform “enables companies to leverage the hard lessons learned by other developers in order to simplify the process.”
“IBM has long been a leader in offering innovative tools for developers to create the applications of our future. Now, IBM is expanding that focus so anyone – from the software novice to the hardware engineer – can easily and quickly access materials providing guidance in the creation, management and connection of IoT devices to each other and the cloud,” said Christopher O’Connor, GM Offerings, IoT at IBM.