Building Developer Communities for the Industrial IoT
Developer communities will be at the centre of enabling businesses and governments of all sizes to implement Industrial Internet of Things solutions.
The Industrial Internet of Things involves data collection, machine to machine communications, and automation. Pipelines can detect leaks and inform repair services, vibration sensors can monitor for safety risks and turn off heavy machinery, agriculture crops can water themselves or identify pest risks, and lighting can increase luminescence depending on the number of people in the given area.
Following the Money in IoT
While the tech-focus at the start of January is usually on the Consumer Electronic Show, the truth is that many of those hardware makers are focused on selling their first thousand or ten thousand units. They see “connection” as meaning “connecting their hardware product to the Internet”, not necessarily “connecting to other hardware”, especially if it is made by other businesses.
That’s what has gotten the home automation, wearables and other markets in such a mess today: the lack of interoperability is now a major obstacle to the IoT opportunity.
In December, tech and funding analyst service CBInsights forecasted that because of this sort of complexity, the number of Internet of Things funding deals was expected to fall for the first year since 2012. That’s not the case for the Industrial Internet of Things. CBInsights reported that the industrial market accounted for 40% of all IoT funding in Q1 — Q3 2016.
The need for IoT Middleware Platforms
The Industrial Internet Consortium says that because of the rapidly growing need for Industrial IoT solutions, and the costs associated with building end-to-end operational capabilities, many businesses will look to an IoT platform provider for middleware services like pulling in data from hardware devices and sensors, analyzing it, and then feeding it into apps or automated processes.
Daniel Elizade, a thought leader on IoT Product Management, defines the IoT stack as comprising of 5 layers, so any new product (in his example below, a smart pump), would need to traverse each of those layers in order to be ready for industry use. In this model, an IoT platform would typically help a business manage the middle three layers. How would they do that? With APIs.
As more enterprises start building Industrial Internet of Things applications, IoT platform providers will be wanting to demonstrate they have a full range of developer resources to support onboarding of new developers.
Analysts are already predicting that APIs will first drive developer adoption of the IoT platforms, and then act as a conduit for those platforms to be introduced into business. After security, telecommunication industry association TMForum sees that partnership onboarding and customer experience are the biggest challenges for businesses when adopting IoT solutions. In a digitised industry market, APIs are how those core business relationships will be operationalised.
These developer communities will also be an essential source of new partnerships and a key customer acquisition channel. Developers who are experimenting with various IoT platforms will have their own preferences and will make recommendations to their business around which one to use when building an IoT solution.
Building Developer Communities for the Industrial IoT
Aaron Allsbrook, from IoT middleware platform ClearBlade, says that one of the biggest tasks for any platform trying to foster developer communities is being able to help developers keep up with the constantly evolving knowledge base that is required to implement Industrial IoT solutions.
“If you just look at the change from January last year to now, for example, edge processing didn’t exist as a public conversation a year ago” he says. “How do you support all the developers building solutions and help them keep up to date? There is a constant need to bring them into the fold without getting them overwhelmed. By far and away, that’s the biggest challenge.”
As a result, ClearBlade are doubling down on developer documentation: not just the core documentation, but also identifying sample patterns, continually building new sample applications, and creating a whole library of self-paced learning resources.
At Cisco DevNet, it is early days in supporting devs who are beginning to experiment with one of their latest communities: Cisco’s Smart+Connected Digital Platform, which can automate management of smart city infrastructure. “It is at an exciting stage where the community is defining itself”, says Amanda Whaley, Director of Developer Experience at Cisco DevNet.
Whaley says that while a lot of their initial developer community members come from enterprise, they are seeding the community with hackathon events that encourage a mix of students and makers to participate as well. “It gets both sides excited. The makers can interact with the developers coming from industry, and we can bring some of that maker spirit into industry.”
One of the biggest challenges for creating IoT API developer communities is the disconnect between what developers are coding and the results that they can see. For most other developers, you can test your hello world integration yourself and see the results. But in IoT, if that involves turning on a machine or a light remotely, how do you know your hello world use case was a success?
“We are in the process of building a new DevNet lab that will have lights and a video feed so that developers can see that kind of instant feedback. We have sandboxes and hardware that developers can reserve to play with as if it was their own lab. We even have simulated and realtime data available to use in your experiments” says Jock Reed, IoT Developer Evangelist at Cisco DevNet.
How IoT platforms foster developer communities and are able to overcome the significant and specific hurdles they face will be a mindshare race as strong as the mobile platform wars. It won’t be just a matter of IoT dev portals applying existing API developer engagement best practices: there are some unique aspects in the IoT space:
- the predominance of enterprise developers (although many may be makers in their own time, interested in experimenting on various platforms),
- the constant learning curve that developers will need to ride, and
- the need for new models to provide feedback loops during onboarding and testing.
These factors will all drive new engagement approaches for the IoT.
This year, we expect to see more investment in IoT developer community support as the IoT platforms stabilise their offerings and begin to ramp up their enterprise sales focus.
Over the coming weeks, Hitch will begin adding IoT APIs to our catalogue of APIs that we are tracking. Here are some of the IoT platforms already beginning to provide open APIs and actively working to build developer communities:
Provider: Cisco
IoT Solution: Full suite developer hub for creating and managing IoT applications
Example use case: In cities, defining specific zones for public lighting in order to manage each zone individually to light pedestrian movement, reduce battery and power consumption and optimize community safety, traffic management and business engagement.
Provider: ClearBlade
IoT Solution: IoT platform for creating integrated solutions that draw on sensor and machine data, application development, and data/analytics
Example use case: Factory machines automatically updating purchasing systems when production is complete.
Provider: FIWARE
IoT Solution: Open source hardware agnostic middleware platform for creation of IoT products and services
Example use case: Water quality monitoring and crop pest risk management
Provider: GE Predix
IoT Solution: Industrial Internet platform
Example use case: Data management, security, analytics, intelligent environments, and operations APIs to help manage industrial IoT applications like traffic planning, parking management, situational awareness. One recent application is building a prototype to optimize production of turbine blades.
Provider: Honeywell
IoT Solution: Connected home API program including thermostats and water management solutions
Example use case: Monitor water usage and identify water leaks and frozen water risks.
Provider: Temboo
IoT Solution: Code generation and application connection platform for IoT
Example use case: Monitor industry pipes for gas leaks and remotely manage gas valves to prevent further leakages.
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