Gartner’s webinar by Alfonso Velosa discussing “Best Practices for Implementing IoT Projects” brought up great points on the current environment for Internet of Things. Some of the points can be utilized for any project that involve enterprise solutions; although some extra details which are IoT centric are key to understanding the current environment, and implementation plans.

The webinar was focused on discussing three summarized points discussed by Gartner’s Alfsonso Velosa covered:

• What are the fundamentals for a successful IoT project?
• Who needs to be involved?
• Which vendors contribute to increasing your success?

In short, have you defined the fundamentals on what smart things will do for you. Do you have clear business objectives defined? Can you apply a return on investment model with your business objective? When fundamental questions can be answered, we can move to who is driving this project, including stakeholders. To capture the success of business objectives, much like other high exposure enterprise projects, you need the right people. A VP, SVP, in essence must drive the small successes by implementation teams to keep momentum moving forward in exposure, and completion towards business objectives. Then, we move to the vendors – what new vendor from the current ecosystem, or current vendor can help support and drive your IoT project. This can also include partnerships and being able to identify your strengths and weakness to improve your success potential.

While the entire webinar is worthwhile and valuable, there are three points in the discussion that really stood out to me. Foremost, understanding there is no current standardization in the Internet of Things implementation. Many of Gartner’s customers reported they utilize IoT in the way that suits their business objectives. There was no selective vendor that offered an entire wholesome solution, or platform for IoT, but rather there are many vendors – even your current vendors, which are competitively producing IoT solutions to support their customers vision.

1. There is no standardization

Internet of Things by itself offers a questionable name. What is a thing? A thing is defined by your business. There is no standard to call be right, or wrong in defining how you utilize a smart thing, and implement IoT into your architecture. While moving through your IoT Journey there is no external standardization influence, the implementation of IoT into your enterprise can lead to defining a standardized process of communication with smart things for you. Along this IoT Journey there will be the need to customize aspects of new vendor technologies or current technologies to implement your final IoT objective. Due to the need to customize for business objectives, it becomes difficult to define an IoT Standard in the industry.

2. Defining your business objectives:

By far, this is the most valuable point. If you have no idea why you want to implement IoT, then you are destined for failure. Not only is defining your business objective crucial, but are you really ready for IoT? At what point of maturity is your enterprise? This can be broken down into levels based off of Gartner’s IoT Maturity Model:

Level 1 – Do you a data collection from your smart things? If no, stop reading and start collections.

Level 2 – Data collection is only available to specific departs (Ex. IT and specific business)

Level 3 – The people who have access to collections can interact and manage smart things

Level 4 – You finally see an outcome from the data collection, and your smart things contain a network of more smart things

Level 5 – Your IoT implementation for smart things has the ability to begin application development to further expand on data collection, and you are able to include new offerings for ROI.

3. Understand the current IoT vendor ecosystem:

The current IoT ecosystem does not have one single platform, which can fully support your IoT implementation. Buyers have to understand that to make IoT successful in their business it will take multiple vendor technologies, and partnerships in the areas you lack. Extending from your data warehouse, microservices, API Management solution for Gateway and security, and even your smart things communication to your edge gateway. This alone may consist of a few vendors for a wholesome solution. This will also lead back to the point that there is no standardization in IoT, which extends into the vendor ecosystem. Gartner points out that we will not see standardization for another decade. Most companies are still at a Level 1 or 2 of maturity, either they do not have a data collection from smart things, or still figuring out how to define ROI with their collection.

The key to keeping your IoT implementation driving towards success is your team. Your stakeholders must keep all smaller successes, or even small IoT projects in sight to drive momentum forward. Every small win should be communicated and measured towards your business objective. Results from smaller projects that was more frequent will be a bigger driver through your IoT Journey. IoT won’t happen in 1, or two years. Many of Gartner’s customers report their IoT Journey to full maturity taking 5 or more years.

Happy Journey!

If you stopped by our Perficient booth at CA World, you would have seen our “Healthee Hub” healthcare demo running on our big screen. The iOS app was developed for the event to showcase CA technologies including CA Mobile Application Services and the CA Mobile API Gateway. The objective was to demo some capabilities to provide an edgy feature set to improve patient and provider relationships with FHIR.

Tech Specifics:

The application was built with Swift 3 and integrated with the MAS SDKs found on http://mas.ca.com. From the technology stack we integrated the Single Sign On options from the MAG, and Encryption, Storage, and Push Notifications from MAS. The FHIR data was pulled from the CA SaaS FHIR Developer portal which allowed the demo to access Patient, and Test data via REST API.

Provider Story

Healthee healthcare providers are saving money with new changes to patient intake and patient relationships. The Healthee Hub App from Perficient and CA Technologies manages updated records via EMR communication from patients to provide the latest health insurance information, patient updates, and medical records without any gaps. Healthcare providers can manage appointments through a mobile app, save time by posting test results online, and provide patients with referrals and pertinent information like latest visit information.

Healthee Hub is also enrolling patients into Apple Research Kit studies, which helps identify and measure patients’ health and wellness. Paired with Fitbit or assigned patient devices, Healthee Hub with updated EMR provides a measurement of how well prepared a patient is to undergo treatment or a procedure, or can provide data insight on immediate health concerns. Healthee Hub improves patient and provider relationships by delivering an engaging platform and more concise patient care.

Patient Story

Healthee Hub is helping patients move into a paperless age. Digitally updated EMR records for each patient saves both the provider and patient time and money. Patients will carry their latest information to every visit, without any missing files or delayed paperwork that occurs with in-network ACOs or health insurance networks.

Patients can access data via secure mobile single sign-on, and from there can view upcoming appointments with any of their healthcare providers.

There is no barrier between patients and their healthcare data. Rather than waiting to receive a phone call from their provider, patients can access test results via a mobile app, anywhere, anytime. Any prescriptions will also display, and patients can conveniently fill them from the app.

Patients can also be referred to a new healthcare provider regardless of network or location. The patient can request a transfer from his or her current healthcare provider, and the necessary HIPAA signatures and paperwork are completed through the app to reduce intake time and risk of information. The transfer approval is relayed between the EMR and the new provider, with necessary and approved paperwork automatically being sent to the new appointment location. When the patient arrives, all test results, records, and family history are already provided, saving significant time.

In the current market research trend there a leaders across various IoT industries setting trends for how companies can start utilizing IoT, and how. Current leaders in the Internet of Things platform market consist IBM, PTC, GE, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services. How do you choose a platform for your company? Consider this criteria:

Connectivity: A platform will have the capability to create and offer management for communication from a device, to the platform. Consider what communication options are supported by the IoT platforms, these can be broke down into these categories for itself:

• Long Range: Low power radio transmissions, cell networks, or satellite these would enable devices to have over the air communication.
• Close Range: Zigbee, Z-Wave, WiFi, Bluetooth.
• Specialized Protocols: MQTT, CoAP, XMPP

Security: IoT is always pressured from all side with security leaks, and flaws. There has been numerous postings about how devices are being hacked, or transmissions captured. Securing the communication between device, and backend is a big priority. Security features that IoT platforms are incorporating to ensure protection are with network connectivity, authentication, identity management, data loss preventing, device management.

Manageability: Platforms consider the capability of device operation, provisioning, and handling maintenance of IoT devices. When there are hundreds, or even thousands of devices to manage the connection, and incoming data a platform will need to ability to handle and scale to these devices. Offering the ability to monitor, utilize testing, updates, and troubleshooting as an all in one solution is a key ingredient for IoT platform solutions.

Analytics: Today’s market will rarely offering analytics on real time data, or the ability to evaluate and transform captured sensor data. IoT Analytics should offer the capabilities for users to easily capture this data, and view it. Vendors like IBM Watson, and Amazon offer predictive analysis for data being captured, which offering even further information on customers, or condition of purchased assets like machinery.

Development: With diversity from a IoT platform the capability to wrap all of the functions into an application for internal or external use becomes primary reason on how to expose analytics and data. IoT platforms offering an easy way to enable developers to simplify code creation, business rules, and data management for the criteria we covered today becomes a key point for any offering. Combining development tools and API Management tools to interface with your internal Enterprise applications, such as CA, Mulesoft, Apigee, IBM, or Amazon into one platform becomes a wholesome solution for IoT.

The most common association with Blockchain is Bitcoin – for this article Bitcoin is strictly a currency for transactions, but not the main focus. If you do you want more information on Bitcoin, this post, What is Bitcoin?, can give you more context. This article will focus on Blockchain in a decentralized ecosystem, and the functionalities of how blockchain could be an integral part of the future with Internet of Things.

What Is Blockchain?

If you are unfamiliar with Blockchain, I suggest reading this post, Blockchain Distilled, to get an in-depth look.

IoT Today

In the current state, we have a centralized platform that enterprise applications are routing to, in this case we consider an API Management Gateway to be a cloud instance – Azure, AWS, whatever you prefer as a host. Our smart devices with access to the internet are, as expected, routing to our gateway to communicate with backend systems. Our smart devices generate data and via some protocol (MQTT, XMPP..) communicate to a broker, or our backend system that collects data and the company collecting data runs some predictive analysis with it.

IoT Tomorrow

Now, as we have set the stage of what Internet of Things can be –  let us move to an edgier idea where our smart devices do not communicate to a centralized location – being our API Gateway to access our backend, but rather work in a decentralized network. Adding on to this, our smart devices are becoming smarter. Devices wouldn’t wait for a state change, but begin interaction with 3^rd parties for us. These 3^rd party transactions essentially become automated to perform a certain function. With this evolution where we do not necessarily have to interact with device for state change the device has evolved into a smart-er device.

A specific example for our next generation smart device will be an electric meter. The electric meter has a connection to the internet, and has historical data of our electric utilization, ex. June usage is 900kW for the month. This smart device is evolved into having the function of utilizing Blockchain – where it can handle transactions with 3^rd parties with Blockchain.

How do Blockchain and Internet of Things come together?

For this example, we will use John, who has decided to purchase a smart meter from retail, or a utility company. John has setup a Blockchain wallet, a common provider is BlockChain.info. John funds his Bitcoin wallet with USD, which is converted to Bitcoin at a market rate. It happens that John’s utility company, SuperEnergy, has a blockchain network he can join, and his smart meter can be registered as a node on that network. John on-boards with his utility company, and his smart meter is setup on the network as a node that will handle monthly payments to SuperEnergy, from his Bitcoin wallet.

The smart meter we discussed earlier has the ability to run a Blockchain client, which would essentially allow it to create blocks, validate transactions, and act a node, (or miner) on the network. The smart device meter is able to authorize payment from John’s Bitcoin wallet, and add blocks to the ledger of the transactions between the utility company and the smart device. All while these transactions are happening John would be notified of the status, or payments, from a web portal, or mobile app. All of this is happening in a secure manner via Blockchain, and the transactions are validated by public keys from each corresponding node on the network.

That was a financial Blockchain case. What about enterprise communication?

Distrust surrounds Internet of Things when security is brought up, and there are numerous reports that devices can be hacked, and communication can be capture. Blockchain provides a solution for that which secures all transmission data in means that if someone was to somehow capture a “block” of the Blockchain, they would not be able to decipher without the proper key. Blockchain is not limited to only financial data, it can be used in any industry. The Blockchain ledger holds any data, and can be compared to a “database of information”, where every block that is created – a new transaction, or “row of data” is entered into the ledger. This includes readings from the smart meter can be inserted into the ledger. The device can act as a node or miner, on the enterprise Blockchain network. Why do this? Blockchain offers additional security, which lies in the mathematical operations it uses for cryptography and hashes, and keys owned by each node.  Each block, on the Blockchain is a new hash, where to continue the Blockchain requires the hash from the previous block to be a valid chain.

What could be the functionality of Blockchain?

Side notes:

• Centralized network: Network where all users connect to one central server
• Decentralized Network: A peer to peer communication network where there is a link between many server for these smaller nodes. Devices on the network can communicate with each other and manage connections between various nodes.
• Distributed Network: No link server connects, and all distributed nodes are able to communicate with each other. There is no single point of failure, as each node can act as a server.

Blockchain in the enterprise will decentralize networks and subdue the need for application platforms to govern or manage communication with other clients internally or externally. This is not only a case for Internet of Things, but could be used for a new architecture pattern. From my experience in the industry, we have moved from one giant monolith to centralized all communication (Enterprise Server Bus), moving to decoupled services, so now there are many interconnected services that have their own endpoints, but route through an API Gateway (Microservices & REST APIs). This movement is leaning towards a distributed ecosystem, and decentralization, where Blockchain could replace current enterprise platforms – Security, Identity Management, Decentralized Consensus, Asset Management, and can replace network protocols currently in use. All of this is embedded with Blockchain features.

 
For more on blockchain, join our upcoming webinar:

MuleSoft positions as a leader in many of Gartner’s Magic Quadrants. The two most relevant are Enterprise Integration and API Management where MuleSoft sits in the Leader quadrant among few vendors. These commendations prove that MuleSoft has the capabilities to support trends such as Internet of Things with the MuleSoft Exchange connector market, cloud and on premise solutions, and extensibility for its MuleSoft Runtime. The most relevant capabilities are:

1. MuleSoft Runtime
2. Anypoint Exchange – MQTT Connector
3. Anypoint MQ

First to set the stage, if you are unfamiliar with MuleSoft or other gateway vendors, each offers some policy logic processing out of the box. Converting XML to JSON, Data transformation, security logic, routing logic, or even just Reg-ex parsing for your HTTP requests and response. If you have used the MuleSoft Anypoint Studio, it uses about 1.5GB of disk space for the full-blown IDE, and around 1 GB of RAM. Now, imagine if you could utilize all of your logic flows (functions discussed above, data transforming, policy logic) on a Raspberry Pi with a single core processor, and 512mb. When I found out about this I was shocked. The full MuleSoft runtime – 150mb installer in size, with all my logic flows, can be placed on an IoT hub, or any device meeting the hardware specification to enhance my IoT strategy.

1. MuleSoft Runtime – MuleSoft can be run on any IoT Developer board – minimum specs are just to have 512mb boards, which most consumer and commercial boards already meet. Just to refine this, check out the first link above, you will see that the MuleSoft runtime that is 150mb, can be install on your IoT Hub, and you have the full capabilities of MuleSoft’s features. One of these examples can be used directly from MuleSoft developers. Referencing the image to show some of the features here, you can see a sample of what the run time can do. If you’re not shocked yet, then let us dive deeper with this example and explain some details.

The Architecture flow: The raspberry Pi has a Linux flavor running, and MuleSoft runtime installed on it which contain logic flows. Cloud Hub offers a hosted solution for your MuleSoft Applications and a Message Queue broker, which is AnypointMQ. The IoT devices connected to the hub running the MuleSoft runtime will transmit data to the hub, the hub will perform your logic flows, and then publish the data to the MQ in Cloud Hub. The free connector in the Exchange can be utilized to create any logic flows necessary, including data transformation.

                Key Points:

• Save time on setup and development – MuleSoft offers its runtime engine for small size factor IoT boards
• Handle security and logic with ease – Data Transformation and other logic process can be performed on the runtime board

2. Anypoint Exchange – MuleSoft has an open market for connectors with many vendors. This means there are offerings for out of the box solutions that your developers do not have to code for, but can integrate with. Common connectors such as Salesforce are there for your CRM, but the one in focus today is the MQTT Connector. MQTT(MQ Telemetry Transport) is a machine to machine transport protocol, is ideal for low bandwidth use cases – especially in sensor communication for IoT. Utilizing this connector, with MuleSoft’s AnypointMQ enables your IoT solution. AnypointMQ acts as your MQ broker out of the box, and all that is required is to configure the MQ connector to your MQ broker to establish the publishing and subscribing for topics.

Key Points:

• Huge time to market boost – users have access to Connectors, Templates, Examples, and APIs in the exchange.

3. AnypointMQ – You will have a hard time finding vendors that will provide a hosted MQ Broker solution out of the box. MuleSoft is a rare breed that offer AnypointMQ as a solution for IoT, or messaging. This enables your smart devices to communicate to your MuleSoft runtime, and stay in the same vendor technology to communicate back to your backend via Anypoint MQ.

Key Point: Wholesome technology offering – MuleSoft brings together IoT by offering a MQ Broker with its technology offering, tying together end-to-end communication in one technology stack.

MuleSoft covers many gaps in offering a wholesome IoT solution:

1. IoT Hub – MuleSoft runtime to manage your smart devices
2. Security/Transport Protocol – MuleSoft security with AnypointMQ, and a MQTT Broker integrated into the solution.
3. Edge Network – Anypoint Platform, on premise, or in the cloud to integrate into your backend and process your IoT Data.

With an evolving connector market, beautiful interface, and forward thinking product releases, MuleSoft shows off well with its capabilities for Internet of Things.

CA World 2016 was truly a great event this year. My first year in attendance and I was amazed at the level of organization, and presence of CA employees from all organizational hierarchies.  There were great booths for technical presentations of CA products, and information sessions for what is coming next. My main focus is in API Management – I got to meet a lot of great folks behind the products I have been using, and being able to hear that all the feedback the CA team received, is being worked on. Below are 3 key points I really took home with me from Vegas.

Keynotes || Presentations

CA is making waves in 2017

Attending most API Management sessions, and talking to various teams that tie into the API Gateway, including MAG/MAS there are big changes in scope for 2017. There are considerations still under wraps per the presentations for API Management roadmaps, but there are new technologies being integrated into the CA API Gateways. Exciting things for me were more of a cloud presence, furthering integration to Amazon/Azure deployments and provisioning, ajd further management with Docker containers.

CA is there for you

CA employees were everywhere! All of our questions were answered, and CA is leaning heavy into support. Their current online support system already has speedy response times, but with the new SaaS product model CA support will always be there. One great thing is when as a user, or customer, you are able to provide feedback on your experience and developers want to listen, and improve. I had a lot of questions on what I thought about X and Y, or do I use X and Y and how. It is a great experience to know that CA is listening and continuously evolving.

API Management is getting a new look

Finally! The UI overhaul I am sure everyone has been waiting for. Noted in the API Management Roadmap there are Developer UI changes coming next year. This has been a distinguishing factor when comparing to other API Management vendor, and this also goes to show that CA is listening, and big changes are coming next year to end users world wide!

With a full product suite now including CA API Live Creator, and Mobile Application Services, CA is really creating a lot of buzz, and most important – a developer following. A push for open source frameworks, and products, will create a great following and custom solutions.

Internet of Things are trending, these things are everywhere.  Two big questions being asked are has how can Internet of Things be used in our business, and what will enable Internet of Things. If you are a current customer of CA, or not,  there is a new product out that can enabled your enterprise for IoT with Mobile Application Services, and the Mobile API Gateway solution. The requirement starts with having a Enterprise Gateway, and also adding in the benefits from the Mobile API Gateway and Mobile Application Services. In this article, we will consider an IoT use case of having a mobile app(iOS or Android), a smart home, an IoT hub, MQTT as our transmission protocol, and a MQTT Broker.

Some considerations – we have:

• IoT devices – we will utilize a smart home in this scenario
• An IoT Hub

                “What is an IoT hub? A hub allows for different smart devices to connect to the hub for data transmission. There are WAN protocols, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, or even MQTT that can be used for hub communication. The hub allows for central unit to control many devices. The hub then connects to your edge platform, such as the CA Mobile API Gateway, to transmit data”

• Utilizing a light weight transmission protocol – MQTT
• A MQTT broker (on premise, or cloud)
• Mobile application to manage some devices

Starting with the Smart home, we have many devices. Our thermostat, lights, garage, door locks, and cameras. All of our devices connect to our hardware agnostic hub.

“What is a hardware agnostic hub? With connection and protocols  such as this use case, hardware agnostic can be defined as no preference to a vendor, or specific brand of smart devices.  The hub we discussed previously actually can be setup in multiple ways. We can install open source software to manage (such as Home Assistant, or ) to manage devices on our WiFi network, on a Raspberry Pi/Arduino running a modified version of Linux. These connections can be made via software like Home Assistant to run and manage devices automatically that connect to the network, or with direct connection via Bluetooth, or Zigbee. “

Our hub has picked up the devices joined to the WiFi network, or configured to speak directly to the hub – MAC Address for Bluetooth, or even Zigbee. Our hub sits in the home, and in this case, we will be using the local Wifi connection to transmit data to our Cloud Broker (CloudMQTT) via MQTT. We setup the the hub to publish any state changes from our smart home devices to the broker. Next, we have our Mobile API Gateway, with the MAS (Mobile Application Services) solution kit installed already. With this installed, CA enables MQTT policy assertions. We can setup a policy to subscribe to our MQTT broker, and transmit our IoT data with two way, mutual SSL for additional security.

Now, we also want to enable our mobile app, which we designed a UI that will manage all of our devices on one page. Here we will see the readings from our thermostat, garage door, locks, lights and cameras. The application created can also connect to the Mobile API Gateway (MAG), and access Mobile Application Services to get subscribed topic data in real time to the app. The app will receive all changes in real time, if a door is unlocked our UI will change as our subscription to the MQTT Topic receives data from the IoT hub. From our app we can also post to the topic and send state changes via MQTT – example, turning lights off and on.

Sidenote: Depending on requirement you could directly subscribe to your MQTT broker, but for additional CA security features and policy logic we are communicating with our Mobile API  Gateway.

CA MAG, and MAS provide these out of the box features for Internet of Things to be enabled for any enterprise. The variety of products may trigger the idea that there is “a lot of setup”, but CA has made it really easy to upgrade your products to a MAG, and then a MAS solution. All of these products come as solution kits which you can find on https://support.ca.com and are a quick 5 minute guided install in your gateway, along with license.

There are many different use cases for IoT, and ways to utilize smart devices. The use case above is a wholesome solution of most common IoT utilities.

MAS (Mobile Application Services) is a new product released by CA available at http://mas.ca.com. This release enables mobile apps to be developed faster, and offers robust out of the box features. Written in Objective-C and available for both Android and iOS, MAS becomes a great solution to add to your mobile strategy.

I created my first mobile app for iOS utilizing Swift, and MAS Frameworks for a Healthcare demo application. MAS and MAG allowed me to extend into Single Sign On, Local Storage, along with encryption that is offered – specifically AES. (i.e. AES-256, HMAC+SHA256, and PBKDF2 are offered) After the demo presentation at CA World a lot of ideas came to add in features that are also enabled by the CA Mobile API Gateway (CA MAG) such as adding in Proximity Login, Social Media, and even One Time Password generation for extra security.

All documentation and SDK’s to get started are available at: CA MAS – all of these great out of box features are ready to be integrated, and all your developers have to do is invoke a feature!

• Messaging
  • Provides the ability for users to subscribe to a topic, and messages can be sent to all users. MQTT enables this features, and security is provided by the Mobile API Gateway. This is a great feature for use cases ranging from traffic, schedule changes, weather, or even sports scores – you could even tie this into server status API to alert administrators of issues!
• User Management
  • Have you had issues exposing your address book to mobile applications? CA provides this feature, in company with MAG to make this easier for you. Utilizing SCIM from the Gateway the communication between domains is made easier.
• Publishing/Subscribing
  • MAS enables your enterprise to simplify IoT with this feature. Setup a MQTT broker such as Mosquito locally, or grab a hosted solution such as CloudMQTT and pub/sub becomes easy. As soon as changes happen, your app can have the latest data with MQTT broker pub and sub. Along with the transmission protocol, having two way SSL to secure your connection puts security at ease.
• Adhoc Groups
  • This feature gives you’re the ability to create membership groups with MAS. Utilizing SCIM 2.0, you can create specific groups to send out updates to selected users. Along with providing the ability to access users or groups from other identity providers (i.e LDAP, MSAD).
• Local Storage
  • Local storage offers one of my favorite features, which is encryption out of the box. As I mentioned above AES-256 is available by simply invoking the MAS Framework to secure a file. For the demo app I created I am encrypting PDF’s that are generated by Swift code, and sent via email. There can be times that local storage is the only option, but there is also the feature for cloud storage – below!
• Private Cloud Storage
  • Cloud storage gives you the ability to share your data across your enterprise to many devices or users. Security, and storage out of the box is provided with this feature. Sharing the same security, plus more with the use of Mobile API Gateway. See here how to get more out of your MAG and MAS setup.

At this point the UI is developed, we’re binding the “Pulse” text to our controller “Received Actions” graph_steps function, based on “Pulse” tap on the screen.

This code is an easy way to get started with testing a new API endpoint when the data is incoming. By no means is it a “best practice”, but this allows you to get up and running with various API endpoints. The assumptions are below. We already grabbed a token from either Postman or an API Explorer portal. See comments in the code.

You can follow my next post for the proper OAUTH 2.0 / Token implementation, but in the meantime Ray Wenderlich has great tutorials to follow

• OAUTH 2.0
• Keychain Storage for Tokens

@IBAction func graph_steps(_ sender: AnyObject) {
var request = URLRequest(url: URL(string: “https://api.endpoint.com/… “)!)
print(request)
//You can pass any required content types here
request.httpMethod = “GET”
// Some bad practice hard coding tokens in the Controller code instead of keychain.
let access_token = “my_token”
//You endpoint is setup as OAUTH 2.0 and we are sending Bearer token in Authorization header
request.setValue(“Bearer \(access_token)”, forHTTPHeaderField: “Authorization”)
let session = URLSession.shared
session.dataTask(with: request) {data, response, err in
do{
let JSON = try JSONSerialization.jsonObject(with: data!, options: []) as! NSDictionary
let dataSet = (JSON.value(forKeyPath: “parentNode-childNode”) as! NSArray).object(at: 0) as! NSDictionary
DispatchQueue.main.async {
let Val = dataSet.value(forKey: “subChildNode”)
// This is specific to the graph UI that is used, and requires CGFloat type.
//currentSteps is my graph UI.
self.currentSteps.setValue(Val as! CGFloat, animateWithDuration: 1)
}
}
catch {
print(“json error: \(error)”)
}
}.resume()
}

Welcome to the Internet of Things series aligning to Enterprise introduction of smart devices! Skipping the introduction to “What is IoT?”, as this has become a buzz word that has many meanings, and utilities, we will focus on the following foundation:

• How to select hardware, protocols, and create a hub network to stream data
• What will make it possible to collect device data streams in the enterprise
• What can or will you do with that data that is collected?

 In this series we will focus on what an enterprise will need for Internet of Things implementation, and what really needs to be considered for respective platforms. Establishing a case for some industries will help drive a discussion, and allow for platform variations in the next posting of this series.

Talking points for next deep dive posting:

• Insurance – Policy pricing based on Smart enabled homes, and vehicles.
• Healthcare – Improving patient care through IoT Devices, and smart health tracking.
• Commerce – Improve customer checkouts, and creating customer profiles from purchase history.
• Energy – Monitor, adjust, and report energy usage in any environments.
• Retail – Implementing NFC points for ad recommendations in stores, and mobile sales pushes with customer recognition
• Smart Homes/Manufacturing/Transportation – Enabling homes, factories, and vehicles with smart sensors, and connections for communication

 Think about your vision. What is your primary goal? To achieve that goal what will you need to consider? Here is a universal list to check off, and what end to end would look like starting externally from the device itself. Each layer will be covered in detail with a respective post going forward.

Client Layer:

• Devices, Hubs, and Interoperability
• External Network – connecting to the edge later

Edge Layer:

• Security
• Protocol Selection and Data Streaming
• API Management Platform

Server Layer:

• Backend Infrastructure
• Asset Management
• Data Collection
• Data Analysis, and Machine Learning

Follow for next series posting or tune in to @prftArvin for updates

Reach out to Arvin.karibasic@perficient.com for questions with the subject “IoT Series”!

The third day, and last, of the I Love APIs conference is today! “Day 3” starts strong with two keynotes, and continues to Developer, IT, and Strategy forums.

What is I Love APIs? Go here for a run down of the conference by Alexandra Haefele: How to Get the Most Out of the I Love APIs 2015 Conference

9:00 AM – Keynote: What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There, with Anant Jhingran discusses company software strategies in today’s competitive world. The approach start-ups take for software development, infrastructure, and operations have pioneered provides the principles that enterprises can use to evolve towards agile, relevancy, and competition.

9:40 AM – Keynote: Apigee Un-Plugged with Ed Anuff, Anant Jhingran, Greg Brail, Shankar Ramaswamy, Martin Nally. Free speaking, unscripted, dialogue with Apigee to answer questions from the public. Chet Kapoor is hosting the discussion.

Chet: When is Apigee open sourcing EVERYTHING?

Greg in short: Apigee will continue to build, and contribute to open source. The amount of open source contribution will continue, and the rest is still being worked on.

Chet: What does Apigee think about AWS?

Ed in short: AWS is good for traffic managed, and offers a great suite of features. The gateway is missing an “intelligent api platform” to work with.

Chet: SOA or REST?

Martin in short: SOA and REST are exact opposites in the sense that operations are invoked through SOA, where REST is the data and the operations are hidden behind as “side-effects”. An API using REST is like database design, where the operations act as triggers. New development should be focused on designing data oriented styles of REST.

Chet: What is the biggest pain with APIs?

Shankar in short: Scaling with evolving changes in design and infrastructure.

Chet: Why is transacting, learning, and adapting not performed as one cycle? Why will Apigee get this right?

Anant in short: Availability of signals has gone up significantly – real time modeling is something new that is available, versus where years ago everything was batch processing. Apigee is acting in this manner to do all in one, and getting it right.

10:30 AM – IoT: Building a Home Security System with Apigee Link using Beaglebone DIY kit

We followed a coding session to create functions for our device to create a security alert sensor that picks up noise from the microphone, and alerts with the buzzer. Using Node.JS and Zetta we issued API calls to the device for “beeps”, and also were able to generate “beeps” when the microphone picked up any sound.

11:40 AM –How Hyper-Connected Consumers Are Transforming Healthcare moderated by Aashima Gupta, Apigee

API Transformation in Healthcare:

• Personalizing patient experiences – do what is best for the patient. The data gathered for physicians allows to generate reports that can be extremely detailed about the patient.
  
• Connected Health – Liberate people through connecting various devices where one device can feed information to a patient – example used: Amazon’s Alexa should be able to tell me how many steps I walked yesterday.
• Financial Incentives – Can providers incentivize consumers to walk 15,000 steps a day? Providers would then reward with Example: ‘100’ miles on their airline programs.
• Predictive Analytics: Combine APIs, and Machine Learning to provide a possible outcome for a patient and to react quickly. Being able to tailor software for every patient provides a reactive approach to patient care.

Aashima: What can you predict for the nxt 10 years in Healthcare?

• Liberate from the bureaucracy of the Healthcare, a change in the US to change the way healthcare operates.
• Free your data, patient records, you are the owner – it may become public
• Ability to see your possible health problems
• Gene analytics – we can see our genome data to improve our standard of living

The second day, called “Day 1” here at I Love APIs begins the speaker series for Strategy, Developer, and IT forums.

What is I Love APIs? Go here for a run down of the conference by Alexandra Haefele: How to Get the Most Out of the I Love APIs 2015 Conference

10:30 AM A late start to todays conference which means I missed Chet Kapoor keynote speech. I tuned into another Developer session “DEFINING AND BUILDING APIS WITH SWAGGER” with Tony Tam, from Apigee.

Using the sample from GitHub for a swagger project HERE we imported the swagger.yaml to showcase editing with swagger. A high level overview in one hour covered creating, starting, editing, testing, projects. Swagger allows for quick, and easy access to your founding API design and launch browser based editing.

11:40 AM – APIs in the enterprise: Lessons Learned – IT Forum with Hara Chakravarthy, Shawn McCarthy, and Max Furmanov. 

Highlights

Features of Great APIs:

Easy to discover

• Consistent naming schemes
• Comprehensive documentation

Easy to use, and adapt to

• Self-service registration, testing, and certification
• Available client SDKs
• Abstract away complexity

Challenge: Knowledge is dispersed among domains with various vocabulary for APIs, and stored among these smaller groups. What was done to overcome?

• To overcome the challenge of being able to standardize vernacular and externalize APIs with domain arranged teams, and create self-contained teams (Engineers, SCRUM masters, QA…) .

Summary: Shared Services teams need to evolve constantly to adjust to the company Agile focus. Maintain a focus on Agile methods and DevOps evolutions to constantly adapt to changes.

12:20 PM – Food trucks!

3:00 PM – IoT Architecture – Insights from Global Deployments

John Calagaze, Centralite, Fabien Papleux, Accenture, and Scott Pirdy, Apigee talk IoT. 

Centralite comes with decades of domain knowledge with IoT, and Accenture comes in with global practice and enterprise experience.

IoT Lifecycle

Define -> Design -> Develop -> Secure -> Deploy -> Support

Define Requirements:

• Market – Does the world need another similiar device?
• Customer – How are they using the data? Local, offsite?
• Technical – Interoperability – Device to Device you have to understand protocols. 
  

Design:

• To be Seen or Not: IoT devices have become focal points, do you want it to be seen, or not?
• Power Options: How are you powering your device? Considerations will need things like replacements, and the size of the battery.
• User Interface: Smart interface – How to pair for the customer, diagnostic data if the device just has an LED as an UI.

Develop:

4-box Architecture

Edge Tier – Platform Tier – Enterprise Tier

Public Tier

By the 4-box architecture analogy everything lives in the Edge tier, connections flow to to the platform tier(i.e. Apigee Link), which follows to the Enterprise tier. The public tier is the web of users that can be calling APIs to access your ‘things’ in comparison to the Edge tier, the Public tier has ‘people’, the Edge tier is all IoT.

Security:

“Biggest concern about IoT systems”

• Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability
• Physical + Direction + Volume + Trust
• Design layered security.

Deploy: 

• Install Equipment
• Provision Equipment
• Deploy Application(s)
• Create Account(s)
• Claim Equipment

Support:

What happens once the product enters the customer’s hands? Considering wireless connectivity, usage, time, and there is always the element of the unexpected after release.

• Support End-point devices (traditional)
• Support connectivity infrastructure (new)
• Support cloud infrastructure (new)
• Support application infrastructure/applications (new)
• Monitor devices – performance and diags (new)

4:10 PM – Fireside Chat: Beyond Hype and Pilot Projects to Generating Business Value with the IoT with Chet Kapoor, and Dr. Satya Ramaswamy, TCS

Chet: Why is IoT so relevant today, is it a 2017 market?

Satya in short: Value derived from IoT devices today can be taken advantage of, including the channels it opens to industries. IoT is showing customers how to reimagine their business.

Chet: What is the hardest thing to do with IoT devices?

Satya in short: Increasing margins, and finding gap where to generate revenue. IoT is a fully complex system to first understand where to integrate, and then how.

Journalist: What are the benefits from IoT (Numbers, metrics..)?

Satya in short: Referencing surveys that were performed showed 16% increase in revenue from IoT. IoT changes the way companies think and in the end can change performance. The real time data that can be gathered from IoT can provide vital predictive analytics for consumers and providers.

Chet: Scenario: What is the criteria on your first IoT project? What should be picked?

Satya in short: What makes the most sense, and follows typical business practice that makes sense. Strategy focus required with so much competition around.

Chet follow up: Pick a small project that is mission critical – trial period, but make sure it is important to your business.