There is no Internet of Things - (yet?)

"There is no Internet of Things", this is a title of a promotion for a recent Forrester report.  The report has one more word in its title -- "yet".   The (right) claim is that while there are a lot of sensors, mobile devices, wearable computing devices and vision about "Internet of Things",  and recently "Internet of everything", the vision was not fulfilled yet, and the world of sensors is still very fragmented.   

What made the (current) Internet successful is a combination of standard protocols, the ease of creating content, and the ease of retrieving its content with the combination of web browsers and search engines.  

In order for the Internet of Things to become "Internet" - there is a need to make it much simpler and standard oriented.  Imagine that in the current Internet the retrieval from the Internet would have required everybody to write SQL queries --  do you think that the Internet  would have become pervasive?

What is the equivalent?  --  standard and simple way to perform the functionality of IoT.   I'll be able to report about our related work  in a few weeks -- stay tuned. 

On event server as the 21st century application server

Paul Vincent has posted in the TIBCO Blog a post entitled:  "event server as the 21st app. server".   

Paul cites TIBCO CEO Vivek Ranadivé in TIBCO's quarterly earning report, and concludes that an event server will is a requirements in many applications that process events in various ways.   

Getting to the notion of application server (see illustration below taken from an article on Websphere Application Server)

Application servers are intended to support services to applications such as:  transaction, storage, database approach, security, high availability, administration and more.     

In the event-driven world there are flowing events, and with the Internet of Things, most data in the universe will be in form of events.   In the event processing manifesto (that Paul has been one of the contributing members to its creation) we talked about "event fabric" which will enable Internet scale sharing of events and will support many applications. Some of the fabric properties mentioned were providing services of  privacy, security, interoperability among fabric instances, provenance, energy efficiency, autonomic computing support (self-tuning etc...), availability, scalability, anonymity, non-repudiation, QoS with multiple criteria.     These are some of the services, and there are of course functional services like context service, adapter and transformation service, filtering service, aggregation service, pattern matching service and more that should be built into the server and can be used by various applications from various application areas and types (BPM, CRM, Social computing, track and trace and many more).    

Paul rightly notes that standards have key role in establishing such event server,  Paul indeed wrote the standards chapter in the manifesto. 

I think that the equivalent of app server based on events is inevitable since events will be at the heart of all applications that take sensor data an input.     Work on standards in this area is an old dream, and hope that we'll be able to advance towards it.