So you have SharePoint. You acquired it through a package you purchased with other Microsoft products, or you heard about it from someone and decided to stand it up and see what it can do. Either way you spent some time, resources and much-needed network capacity to put this in place. Now what? That’s a question many organizations ask, and if you’re not asking this question you’re probably still using Sharepoint wrong. Let me explain why.
Many of the organizations I’ve spent some time with have SharePoint. Most have the Foundations version and have no idea why they would pay for the Enterprise license. Foundations is still a strong version and can be utilized to reduce company expenditures on other vendors for products such as hosting your intranet or conducting surveys, as a few examples. I’ve seen this time and time again. A company has an external vendor that hosts its intranet. The design elements are minimal and the cost associated with development of a product that can integrate with the organizations email client or other applications can be costly. Why would you spend that time and money when you have the capabilities and product sitting on your network not being utilized to its minimal potential? SharePoint can be your front-facing intranet/extranet site. It can be your employee daily landing page with links to tools, web-hosted applications, announcements, statistics, documents, pictures, knowledge, reports, presentations, surveys, and more.
Think about it for a moment: You probably have a team portal setup for each department or some of your departments. It’s probably a basic SharePoint template with an Announcement section, Document Repository, Calendar, maybe a fancy logo and a tab at the top to go to the parent site. If this sounds like you, then you’re using Sharepoint wrong. Remember, SharePoint’s a tool that has many capabilities.
With the basic features offered through SharePoint Designer and the default page and web part templates, you can customize each portal, page and web part to fit many of your business needs without spending money on development. You don’t need a web developer to manipulate multiple lines of code to embed a video on your page or customize the layout. You can assign rights to individual teams and with little training they can be off and running on their own – now designing portals specific to their function and needs. I’m not saying go and fire your web developers. I am saying you can utilize the functionality of SharePoint so your web developers can focus on other projects. You can code pages in SharePoint and design web applications, custom API calls and external facing sites. So keep those web developers around.
Now that I have you thinking about what you can use SharePoint for, let’s talk about why you might consider the Enterprise license. The first thing I think of when someone asks about the Enterprise license is Workflows. Workflows can be designed to do many, many, many, many automated things. Let’s say you have a employee-engagement survey. You want to know how your employees feel about the organization or an application that just went live. You use SharePoint and create a really cool survey that changes the questions based on the previous answers, then take that information and add it to a live, up-to-the-minute graph on your main page. How do you do that? Answer: Workflow.
Maybe you have a form that needs to be filled out, and when someone submits the form, an email needs to be sent to a group for review. How do you do that? Answer: Workflow. If you haven’t already guessed why the Enterprise license is useful, the answer is: Workflows.
Another thing that comes to mind when someone asks about the Enterprise License is MS Office integration. Yes, I said it. MS Office Integration. It delivers the ability to collaborate on those projects or documents right through SharePoint, or create awesome Visio diagrams on your main page. Maybe you really wanted to use an Access Database for something and need to easily query the results in a list. I’m here to tell you that SharePoint Enterprise license has MS Office integration.
A few other features you’ll miss without the Enterprise License include business intelligence, robust search features, custom social-media-style profile pages, more design elements, scorecards, dashboards and a better mobile experience. All versions of SharePoint have Android and IOS support, however, I’ve found the Enterprise version has more features for navigation that work better with the mobile devices.
If you’re not already preparing a use case for SharePoint, and an argument for why you should upgrade your license, then you really should get out there on the Internet and browse some additional topics. Check out what other companies are talking about. Really think hard about why you have this product in your environment you’re not doing anything with. There are many resources available to help you start your SharePoint journey. Why not start it today?
Art work provided by John Norris
Category: Internet Of Things
MQTT – Valuable Then and Now
In 1999, Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark of IBM and Arlen Nipper invented a simple messaging protocol designed for low bandwidth, high-latency networks. They named it MQ Telemetry Transport, better known as MQTT. This pub/sub, lightweight protocol adds a heightened security element to messaging via highly unreliable networks. It requires minimal network bandwidth and device resources, while ensuring MQ’s noted reliability and assured delivery standards.
What makes MQTT still valuable today? This protocol has dramatic implications and growing use cases for the Internet of Things (IOT), where the world of connected ‘things’ connects an endless variety of devices, sometimes with minimal power availability. In other words, as all these devices “talk” via the Internet, the MQTT transport protocol ensures that these conversations stay secure and private. In order to understand how MQTT can improve your company’s ability to navigate the digital economy, you’ll need to get more acquainted with the nuts and bolts of the protocol.
Standards: While in the process of undergoing standardization at OASIS, the protocol specification is openly published and is royalty free.
SCADA and MQIsdp: SCADA Protocol and MQ Integrator SCADA Device Protocol are both old names for what is now known as MQTT.
Security: You can pass a user name and password with a MQTT packet in V3.1 of the protocol. Encryption is independent of MQTT and typically handled with SSL, though this does add network overhead. Keep in mind there are other options outside of the base protocol.
Implications and use cases: One of the oft-cited use cases, likely due to the underlying popularity of the application, is the Facebook messaging application.
When Facebook engineer Lucy Zhang was looking for a new messaging mechanism for their app, she knew she had to address bandwidth constraints, power consumption and platform variety (iOS, Android, Windows, etc). She turned to MQTT. While a truly innovative use for the protocol, this type of messaging isn’t the most typical use case.
M2M: MQTT’s true power lies in machine-to-machine communication. It’s specification to cover device communications enables any device to communicate information to any other system or device. Smart meters are an excellent example of an MQTT use case. This lightweight messaging protocol excels in communication among multiple sensors, often in remote locations, with limited power and inconsistent network connectivity.
In the case of smart grids, utilities companies can use MQTT to better predict where crews need to be in advance of weather events. In addition, transportation authorities can monitor road conditions to modify routes in advance of storms or accidents and detour commuters around construction sites.
Conclusions: MQTT has only recently come into its own as a mature, supported, reliable transport protocol to enable communication in a truly connected world – a world where meters can feed their data into analytics systems, combining with other data like weather information or social media trends, to perform predictive analytics.
TxMQ is working with a number of companies on next generation use cases for MQTT that better drives the digital economy, improves outcomes in healthcare, enhances lives and improves our planet for all of us.
Get in touch today for information on how we can partner with you on your digital evolution.
Chuck Fried is the President and CEO of TxMQ, a Premier IBM Business Partner supporting customers in the US and Canada since 1979. chuck@txmq.com
MQTT Repositories Review – Mosquitto, MessageSight & More
In my previous blog (Rigorous Enough! MQTT For The Internet Of Things Backbone), I presented the MQ Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, which helps provide the required communication for smart devices. But without a broker repository or destination to support the protocol, MQTT can’t complete its mission.
In this article, I’ll first review one of the open-standard MQTT repositories called Mosquitto, and then cover IBM MessageSight. In future blogs I’ll present additional information on both the security component and additional broker functionality.
Mosquitto is an open-source (BSD-licensed) message broker that implements the MQTT protocol versions 3.1 and 3.1.1. It provides a lightweight server implementation of the MQTT and MQTT-SN protocols, written in C, so it can run on machines that can’t run a JVM.
Mosquitto regularly has an executable in the order of 120kB that consumes around 3MB RAM with 1,000 clients connected. There have been reports of successful tests with 100,000 connected clients at modest message rates.
In addition to accepting connections from MQTT clients, Mosquitto can bridge to other connected MQTT servers, including other Mosquitto instances. It’s thus possible to architect MQTT server networks, and pass MQTT messages from any network location to any other.
A second repository for MQTT is IBM MessageSight, which is built for high performance to offer persistent, transactional messaging. The hardware is 2U form factor. IBM MessageSight includes built-in security to enable integration with external Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) security systems. MessageSight also offers Transport Layer Security (TLS), Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), FIPS 140-2, NSA Suite B ciphers and Level 1 secure Crypotgraphic Store securities.
Fine-grained messaging-authorization policies restrict access based on combinations of: user or group, client identifier, protocol, network interface, listening address and/or port, client IP address or range and destination topic and queue name.
The MessageSight repository supports connectivity to WebSphere Message Broker via JMS and/or MQTT nodes. It also integrates with Java environments and with rich HTML5-based web applications. Additionally, MessageSight allows development of interactive mobile-messaging applications with IBM Worklight Studio Developer, which delivers:
- Friendly APIs and libraries
- MQTT clients and libraries for a variety of platforms (C- and Java-based APIs)
- Libraries for Google Android and Apple iOS
- JMS client
- JavaScript API for HTML5-based applications
- PhoneGap MQTT plugins with JavaScript API for use with IBM Worklight
- Apache Cordova
- Adobe PhoneGap
MessageSight also offers simple and scalable management through policies. A single user ID is defined on the queue manager for IBM MessageSight, which enables a business to sense and respond to data coming from the edge of the enterprise. IBM MessageSight offers high availability with either an active or passive standby.
There are several public repositories that include Hive MQ, which provides a repository that anyone can engage with. In addition, there is cloudMQTT, which is a repository hosted in the cloud. There are other implementations of the broker space, namely gnatMQ, which is an implementation of MQTT but specifically for.Net, and ActiveMQ, which is a product of the Apache group.
Do health-tracking wearables actually make us healthier?
When I’m not writing all about the health IT world, I am a personal trainer, and it never ceases to amaze me how often these two worlds collide. The other day one of my training clients said to me – “I’ve gained almost 10 pounds since I got my <insert name of popular health-tracking device here>. Isn’t it supposed to do the opposite?”
I thought about it for a minute.
“Well,” I began, “Do you wear it every day? Have you forgotten it any?”
The client shook her head. “I only take it off to shower and to charge it.”
I thought a little more.
“How have your behaviors changed since you started wearing it?”
Now she looked at me strangely. She shrugged. I asked her to keep wearing her health-tracking fitness band, but to also go back to keeping a journal where she logs in her activities and her food. In addition, I asked her to also log in how often she consults her wearable.
When she came back to me the next week, she handed over the journal. It didn’t take long to see what the problem was. In the evenings, when my client had consulted her health-tracking device (which she does about a billion times a day), she would then consume the exact amount of calories she had remaining in order to come in right at her daily goal. However, sometimes these snacks consisted of highly processes carbohydrates and sugars. In addition, her fitness band had no way of knowing her muscle mass or the speed at which she metabolizes specific types of food.
Technology plays an enormous and essential role in the detection, diagnosis and treatment of many life-threatening diseases. Digital devices monitor heartbeats and blood pressure, all able to be analyzed by the amazing connectivity of the Internet of Things. We can cure and prevent more illnesses than ever imagined before with digestible sensors, hybrid operating rooms and 3D printed biological materials. However, as a fitness professional, I’m not talking about that kind of technology. I’m talking about the kinds of health-tracking gadgets, like wristbands, apps and trackers, that have become as common place as the timeless Timex. Can these wearables really stop, or even reverse, the American obesity epidemic?
The answer is — it depends. In my client’s case, no. Or, not exactly. She was using the fitness band to justify eating poorer quality foods more often. For some people, however, they do work amazingly. I regularly meet marathon runners who worship the Garmin watches that help them track speed, as well as fitness band enthusiasts who saw the fat melt away from the moment they plugged in. The crux is this – in order to live a healthier lifestyle, you have to change human behavior. While these health-tracking devices cannot force behavior change, they can make us more aware of our actions and choices.
Interested in using health & fitness tech to kickstart or continue your healthy lifestyle? Check out CNet’s review of top wearables under $200:
Rigorous Enough! MQTT For The Internet Of Things Backbone
The topic of mobile devices and mobile solutions is a hot one in the IT industry. I’ll devote a series of articles to exploring and explaining this very interesting topic. This first piece will focus on MQTT for the Internet of Things – a telemetry functionality originally provided through IBM.
MQTT provides communication in the Internet of Things – specifically, between the sensors and actuators. The reason MQTT is unique is, unlike several other communication standards, it’s rigorous enough to support low latency and poor connectivity and still provide a well-behaved message-delivery system.
Within the Internet of Things there’s a universe of devices that provide inter-communication. These devices and their communications are what enables “smart devices,” and these devices connect to other devices or networks via different wireless protocols that can operate to some extent both interactively and autonomously. It’s widely believed that these types of devices, in very short time, will outnumber any other forms of smart computing and communication, acting as useful enablers for the Internet of Things.
MQTT architecture is publish/subscribe and is designed to be open and easy to implement, with up to thousands of remote clients capable of being supported by a single server. From a networking standpoint, MQTT operates using TCP for its communication. TCP (unlike UDP) provides stability to message delivery because of its connection-oriented standard. Unlike the typical HTTP header, the MQTT header can be as little as 2 bytes, and that 2 bytes can store all of the information required to maintain a meaningful communication. The 2 bytes store the information in binary using 8 bits to a byte. It has the capability to add an optional header of any length. The 2 bytes of the standard header can carry such information as QOS, type of message, clean or not.
The quality-of-service parameters control the delivery of the message to the repository or server. The options are:
| Quality-Of-Service Option | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 1 | At most once |
| 2 | At least once |
| 3 | Exactly once |
These quality-of-service options control the delivery to the destination. The first 4 bits of the byte control the type of message, which defines who’ll be interested in receipt of these messages. The type of message indicates the topic of the message, which will manage who receives the message. The last element will be the clean byte, which like the persistence in MQ will determine whether the message should be retained or not. The clean option goes a step further in that it will also tell the repository manager whether messages related to this topic should be retained.
In my next blog I’ll discuss the broker or repository for these messages. There are several repositories that can be used, including MessageSight and Mosquitto among others. The beauty of these repositories is their stability.
(Photo by University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life)
Using IBM MessageSight For Remote Vehicle Services
The past year has shown us this important trend: Automobiles are the prime driver behind the growth of the Internet of Things. The thought of connected dishwashers and toasters and thermostats and hockey sticks is intriguing, but smartcars are where the action’s at. Manufactures know it. App developers know it. And IBM knows it too.
IBM, in fact, is heavily pushing its MessageSight appliance as a connected-car solution for remote services. Big Blue’s approach is logical, and I like the company’s suggested use cases. Here are a few examples of how MessageSight might be deployed to support remote vehicle services.
- Unlock doors. We already have remote unlock via key fobs and satellite, but the third option of a phone or pad unlock would be extremely handy. It would also save insurance companies money due to less frequent locksmith reimbursements. And it’s pure gold for car-rental companies that no longer need an employee to be onsite to unlock vehicles.
- Monitor warm-up temperatures. Remote car starters are already common, but MessageSight could empower climate control via phone or pad to not only start your car, but monitor the air conditioning and heater as well.
- Vehicle gauges. Develop an app to interface with the dashboard display to monitor tire pressure, fuel level, oil level, battery charge and more. Then interface those readings with calendaring software to generate reminders and schedule maintenance appointments.
- Vehicle Find. Key fobs only broadcast so far. Tap your phone or pad to toot the horn or flash the lights in a giant parking lot to easily find your vehicle.
- Predictive maintenance. Manufactures can collect data on usage and performance to lessen warranty claims and deliver push notifications for suggested maintenance plateaus.
- Driver assistance features. This technology is rapidly expanding. Prior examples of driver-assistance features include anti-lock brakes, object sensors and reprogrammed shift sequences. The near future is sure to include adaptive cruise control, infrared driving aids, lane-departure warnings, laser-based object sensing and more – all controlled via phone or pad.
- Increased efficiencies for fleet management. Enable real-time communication, routing and updates between driver, the vehicle itself and the sales-order system.
What sets MessageSight apart is how well the appliance integrates to support different networks and data-exchange rates, as well as the way it delivers appliance-quality security to the edge of the network.
Learn more about MessageSight: Contact TxMQ vice president Miles Roty for a free and confidential consultation: (716) 636-0070 x228, miles@txmq.com.
Internet Of Things In Focus At Europe's IFA Fair
Stroll through any box electronics or homestore nowadays and you’ll see the beginnings of the Internet of Things (IoT) – formal slang for the coming world of interconnected everyday devices. Best Buy is selling a smartphone-controlled garage-door openers and smartphone-enabled deadbolts as just a few examples.
Some true action on the IoT front took place this week at Europe’s IFA tradefair, held this year in Berlin, Germany. It concluded today and is touted as “the world’s leading tradeshow for consumer electronics and home appliances.” German engineering is always front and center at the show.
Early reports out of the show point to several highlights:
- A robotic vacuum cleaner from British sensation Dyson
- A growing horde of smartwatch competitors, led by Samsung’s Galaxy Gear S (Apple had its own homegrown Watch rollout concurrently in California)
- TVs with convex screens to better mimic the cinematic experience
- A new Sony glass to compete with Google Glass in the market of aug-reality
- Appliances for the interconnected home
About No. 5: Bosch and its partner Siemens debuted their first Home Connect oven and dishwasher, which should be available before the 2014 holidays. The Home Connect app, announced last spring, will run on iPhone and Droid and control compatible devices through the app.
The important part of this news is to track the competition for the overall IoT standard. Home Connect is an open standard that Bosch-Siemens developed. Both brands use it, and curiously, it supports other competitive brands. Bosch and Siemens in fact passed on the Apple HomeKit connection standard in favor of their own proprietary system.
The Home Connect appliances are definitely cool. The engineering quality is crazy good – you’d expect nothing less from brands like Bosch and Siemens. But in terms of the IoT, they still only talk to each other. We’ll see in the coming year whether other manufactures develop for the Home Connect standard, or whether Google Nest, or Apple HomeKit or other emerging platforms can successfully attract brands into their big tent.
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The Apple Watch Measures The Pulse Of Where We're Going
It’s always great to step up the technology vista and peer over edge. We did that today with another big-tent, big-roar presentation from Apple for its worldwide debut of the Apple iPhone 6, Apple iPhone 6 Plus and Apple Watch.
At first glance they’re all killer products. The iPhone 6 ups processing power and display size. The Plus version, with a 1920×1080 (2-million-pixel) display, nests within that space between a phone and pad. The standard 6 model boasts a 334×750 (1-million-pixel) display. This is a great step up for users, but will certainly tax iPhone-only developers who are accustomed to developing for a single screen size. Expect to see the premier Droid-iPhone shops to have the best-performing third-party apps right out of the gate.
About the Watch: I think it’s a glimpse at what’s coming and this is the necessary next step. I was front and center for the first electronic-watch revolution in the late-’70s, when we all wanted to wear a calculator, digital stopwatch and moon-phase calendar on our wrists. When Mario Bros. came out on a wristwatch a decade later, we all needed a videogame on our wrist.
I think the Apple Watch is different, though, because it centers its appeal on two critical trends – personal fitness and e-pay.
The Apple Watch is a stunning personal-fitness tool, and because it’s open to app development, fitness apps will quickly flood the App Store. What’s especially important, I think, is how the phone tracks sit vs. stand vs. walk vs. run time. A simple extra 30 minutes of standing a day can increase fitness, leg and foot health and general confidence and attitude. The Apple Watch can measure, graph and remind its user of all these daily activity measures and more, including heart rate – all while connected to our social networks through the partner iPhone.
Apple is also touting the watch as a checkout-payment system: Swipe your watch, not your card. It’s where we’re headed as a society, certainly. And Apple must be salivating at the volume and depth of real-time big data that might stream in from 10 to 30 million active shoppers using their watches at retailers. But again, I think today was the vista – a look at where we’re going. The problem with the watch is that it must work in conjunction with an iPhone 5 or 6. So why not just use your phone to pay? The answer, I presume, is that the watch doesn’t yet have the connectivity to support standalone, real-time transactions. That’s still the exclusive domain of the cellular-data phone.
Count me as fascinated, though, and as someone who’d like very much to engage with a more personal piece of wearable tech and lite versions of apps that have a direct impact on personal health and social interconnectivity. And I can’t help but think this is somehow a step toward an era we’re all wanting – a time when passwords become arcane and we use a small item, something like the Apple Watch, to bio-authenticate our logins and purchases. If that’s truly the pulse of where we’re going, the Apple Watch is here to help show us the way.
Photo by Apple.
Tracking IoT Conversations: Where The Material Meets The Ethereal
There’s been a marked increase in chatter about the coming IoT – the “internet of things” – with some important revelations and developments this week and last about the quick ramp-up of this emerging and potentially $19T space.
When you track the conversation, there’s an important distinction in voice. On the one hand we have the makers of the things (those ones who manufacture the objects). On the other we have the connectors of the things (those who write the software to network the objects). The one hand is the material, the other the ethereal.
A strong voice within the maker space is German industrial powerhouse Robert Bosch, Inc. The company’s chairman of the board of management Volkmar Denner recently gave an interview to the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag. Denner was asked about Google and whether Google (aided by its $3B acquisition of Nest) will grow to dominate the interconnectivity of everyday physical objects like garage-door openers, bicycles, thermostats, cars and power tools, just as it dominates search, user video and a major chunk of mobile. Here’s a snippet from the interview:
Welt am Sonntag: Google has also acquired the connected device company Nest, so it is making inroads into the world of physical objects. Will Google dominate the internet of things??
Denner: In my view, it’s still not been decided who will play the most important part in the internet of things – IT companies or companies that truly understand the objects themselves. It’s often forgotten that Bosch already produces software that is integrated into objects. This is an area we have a better handle on than the dedicated IT software houses. In the connected world, Bosch benefits from a combination of both hardware and software expertise – coupled with our broad technical base and the depth of our knowledge of the sector.
Welt am Sonntag: So is Google being overvalued?
Denner: I have great respect for Google. But what’s essential here is to have expertise in physical objects. And we are currently seeing that IT companies are in fact still struggling to get to grips with the world of objects. It’s no easy task to reliably manufacture good, high-quality objects.
Denner’s comments set a nice springboard for this week’s news that Bosch Automotive – the corporation’s largest business segment, which represents 66% of Bosch’s annual $6.3B revenue – partnered with IBM to create a brand new engineering platform for auto-component connectivity. A joint press release announced the partnership and noted: “Driven by innovation in consumer electronics technology, the automotive sector is under immense evolutionary pressure. Today’s vehicles are more connected than ever – containing as many as 100 computerized controllers and 10 million lines of software code. As vehicle complexity continues to rise, automotive suppliers must address pressures to reduce costs and to innovate quickly, while also managing the intense challenge of delivering vehicle quality.”
So here’s a situation where Bosch and IBM created a partnership to co-develop the material and the ethereal from day-1 planning through process and into production – the exact combination Denner says is critical to succeed within the new now of the IoT. It’s an important distinction, again because in the emerging world of the IoT, connectivity must be a germinal, not latent thought. The influence of Steve Jobs is obvious.
Maybe this will be the ultimate legacy of Steve Jobs, who first championed the marriage of OS and hardware in Apple 1.0, then later developed the holy trinity of integrated OS, hardware and industrial design in Apple 2.0. A legacy whereby the equal interplay of connectivity, materials and design will revolutionize and guide the 21st century of manufacturing, the same way Ford’s assembly line revolutionized and guided the 20th century.
All of which then sets up important commentary from the application-side of the discussion. I recommend you take the time to read Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi’s 3-part series on the internet of things.
Dr. Eslambolchi argues for an application-aware network (AAN) model to connect the world’s physical objects and sets up his argument by stating: “Once a century, a new industry revolutionizes the way we live. This century, that industry is the internet of everything (IoT).” He later says: “Comparable to how the introduction of hosting services dramatically changed the web, the AAN will generate a similar shift in how companies view networking. I do believe every company is beginning to change the game for customers by turning the network ‘inside out’ – creating a user-centered, application-driven network. This is unlike the model of the 20th century with the network being the core and application at the edge. I like to think of this as rotating the direction of thinking from application outward to networks that support it in both wireless and wireline businesses across the globe.”
There’s a good bit of futurespeak there, but Dr. Eslambolchi points to the inescapable fact that the application layer has grown immensely in size and response, and right now, manufacturers large and small can gain easy access into the IoT through the application layer.
If you’re coming at the conversation from the material side, application awareness and access might seem a bit complicated. The good news is that low-cost, high-value tools are available right now to connect web-enabled physical objects.
Let’s say you’re a manufacturer of a web-enabled object, or have plans to launch a web-enabled object like a garage-door opener, a fishing reel, a bicycle or a pedometer. An Application Programming Interface (API) is the logical networking choice right now. More and more companies are developing and exposing APIs. One reason is that public-facing production can be quite simple through a custom API that interfaces with any number of different platforms including phones, pads, desktop browsers and even social-media notification systems.
TxMQ typically recommends IBM API Management Suite for API exposure and management. It sits on top of IBM’s DataPower Appliances and not only handles the management of any API(s) you wish to expose, but adds a security layer as well.
Here’s a plain-language example. Let’s say you’ve just released a web-enabled garage-door opener. You’ve developed a use case whereby a homeowner is to be notified if the door opens any time between user-designated hours. You could craft a custom API to interface with mobile phones. You expose and manage the API, again with a security layer, entirely through the IBM API Management Suite. The solution allows you to offer smoother, more stable customer interface at the same time you slice development and monitoring costs within the smart-object market. And the big payoff comes during the next design cycle, when connectivity becomes your baseline principle – not an afterthought.
It’s one example among potential millions, but illustrates how small and large businesses need to connect their existing products starting today, and forward-engineer the interconnectivity of their products starting tomorrow.
Interested in learning more about the IBM API Management Suite and TxMQ’s custom API solutions? Visit TxMQ.com or send a confidential email to consulting@txmq.com.
Click this link to read a previous TxMQ blog, authored last year by recruiter Corey Switzer-Kruss, about the IoT and the fourth industrial revolution.
(Photo courtesy of Flickr contributor GM)