1. 49M2M Now - February / March 2015
INTERVIEW
One of the recurring problems of the whole convergence sector throughout its
history has been that one part of the complex value-technology chains involved
always – and inevitably - lags behind developments in the rest of the infrastructure
and systems. As a result, potential commercial and personal benefits remain
unrealised, money and time are wasted on ultimately fruitless integration initiatives
and innovation grinds to a halt across the whole sector.
Until recently, it’s looked like the M2M/IoT sector
was approaching just such a stop point.
Commercial and technological developments
over the last few years have now given us a broad
range of connectivity options suited for different
markets. The device, sensor and gateway
ecosystem has similarly widened to capture data
– the lifeblood of these new value chains that
we’re trying to create. One problem however
remained: what to do with the data once we’d
collected it….
Sure, we do have data analytics tools and
disciplines suited to supporting very narrow
objectives through point solutions. Like all point
solutions however, they’re often dedicated to
resolving one particular problem and lack the
dynamism, flexibility and openness that the
emerging M2M/IoT landscape demands.
Now, however, new approaches to managing the
flow of data and then properly exploiting it are
finally appearing. M2M Now’s Alun Lewis sat
down with one company recently formed to
address exactly this issue – wot.io – and spoke
with two of its founders, president Allen Proithis
and CTO Tom Gilley about its – so far – unique
solution.
M2M Now: wot.io formally defines its offering as
‘a data service exchange, supporting a
marketplace of pre-integrated third-party data
services and applications’. While the terms used
there may be clear to some readers, for many
potential customers entangled with the often
messy day-to-day realities of running a
business, it’s just yet more technological jargon.
How do you explain your offering in language
appropriate to the non-technical user?
AP: There are lots and lots of companies out
there, as well as a diverse range of organisations
and institutions such as city municipalities, who
already know that there are potentially huge
wot.io: Understanding
the Chatter of Things ▼
Reproduced from M2M Now Magazine

2. 50 M2M Now - February / March 2015
benefits to them, their customers and the wider human
community from exploiting M2M/IoT. The problem is that
they’re currently struggling to make sense of an extremely
fragmented and still largely un-interconnected
environment. Many of the ‘solutions’ out there still reflect
their origins in specific sectors or technologies, and that
heritage in turn affects how problems are identified and
the answers proposed.
A company could try and go it alone, but all too often
they’ll find themselves quickly bogged down by the sheer
number of suppliers, partners, technologies and systems
that they need to get to work together in what should be
seamless and harmonious ways. This complexity involves
far more than just connectivity, especially where issues of
corporate or personal data security, legality and privacy
are involved. Compounding this complexity even further is
the fact that each sector – indeed each company – always
has some requirements that are unique.
This is especially true when it comes to extracting useful
and actionable information and knowledge from the data
gathered from a multitude of connected devices. Our key
differentiator is that we have assembled a wide range of
best-in-breed and often open-source application, tool,
platform and framework partners. These complement our
underlying data exchange service which links to the
many platforms out there that are actually collecting
data from devices.
Customers can select from these in almost infinitely
flexible pick-and-mix ways to select the appropriate tools,
applications and services as and when they need them on
a subscription basis. Rather than the traditional approach
to application integration where elements are almost
welded in place, our concept is more like Velcro: easy to
set up and similarly easy to tear down as business and
data needs change.
These resources - what we call our ‘integrated
marketplace’ - are continuing to grow and already include
leading specialist companies in the fields of device
management, data management, analytics, business
intelligence, scripting, web automation, systems
integration, and social media. If we don’t currently have
the tools that you require, you can be sure that they’re
already on our agenda.
M2M Now: One recurring thorn in the convergence
vision – though that’s fast becoming a very dated and
20th century term – is who takes responsibility when
something goes wrong given the extremely diffuse
nature of the operating environment. How is wot.io
addressing this in the M2M/IoT space?
AP: You’re right and this is one thing we’ve focused on
heavily right from the very beginning. Almost all of our
team have worked at very senior levels in the telecoms
and IT sectors over many years and have a simultaneously
deep and broad appreciation of business-critical issues in
ways that a younger, more web-centric cohort might not.
Put bluntly, our customers have one throat to grab – ours
– while we’ll already have in place all the underlying SLAs
and contracts needed to optimise our own partner
relationships. We’re also able to interpret performance
metrics as they relate to specific customer needs to
ensure that service quality, availability and security are
appropriately tailored for each user case. Taking these
responsibilities on ourselves instantly frees the customer
from the pain, grief and effort involved if they’d tried
doing the whole thing themselves.
▼
“Almost all of our team have worked at very senior
levels in the telecoms and IT sectors over many
years and have a simultaneously deep and broad
appreciation of business-critical issues in ways
that a younger cohort might not.” Allen Proithis
Allen Proithis is president and founder
INTERVIEW
IN ASSOCIATION WITH wot.io Reproduced from M2M Now Magazine

3. 51M2M Now - February / March 2015
One increasingly important rider to that concerns the legal
issues that naturally arise when you’re dealing with often
highly sensitive data in national or international contexts.
Once again, we’ve addressed these issues from day one of
the company and helping customers mitigate or control
these risks forms an implicit part of our whole offering.
M2M Now: Your answers so far seem to indicate that you
could be aiming to make at least some of the classic
System Integrator (S.I.) community ultimately
redundant. How do you see them reacting to offerings
like yours?
AP: It’s true that S.I.s have often had problems selling into
this space in the past. While very few of their potential
customers have the skills and expertise in place to develop
their own M2M/IoT solutions, they’ll also shy away from
what they perceive could be an open-ended and
expensive lock-in relationship with a system integrator.
What we’re now finding very interesting is that some
S.I.s are now starting to use wot.io’s platform and services
as a way of economically and flexibly enhancing their own
very real strengths in specific market sectors, merging this
insight with our tools and operating environment. It’s a
complementary relationship: they can focus on delivering
high-end strategic consultancy and project management –
wot.io deals with the technical integration, as well as the
essential commercial and legal frameworks that underpin
service delivery and guarantee QoS. Indeed, some S.I.s
are now finding that with us as part of their proposal,
they’ve got a second chance of winning a contract.
We’re agnostic here, both in terms of our tools and our
business model, and while we might advise customers, we
have no intention of becoming sector-centric business
service providers.
M2M Now: Tom, as CTO, you’ve got a complex landscape
of partners, tools, products, frameworks and
applications to support. Can you talk us through what
you see as some of the most significant elements here?
TG: Before drilling down into specifics, we can roughly
divide these domains into three mutually supporting areas.
Firstly there’s our growing range of data service and
applications partners – more on them shortly.
Underpinning the wot.io data exchange services is our
bip.io Web Automation platform which offers access to
over 50 data services. This a free platform, fully open for
developers to explore and experiment with, which
integrates our operating environment with the world of
business workflow, linking into email, productivity and
CRM tools including Zoho, Slack, Dropbox and Google
Drive; social apps like Twitter and Flickr; as well as
syndication feeds such as RSS and Atom. We’re currently
getting around five to ten users a day sign up to exploit this.
Alongside this, we also recently announced a partnership
to provide appliance and connected device application
developers with an easy path to mass production through
use of Marvell’s Kinoma Create platform. In this device
context, wot.io was already partnering with ARM to
provide native support for the company’s mbed platform
across a range of architectures, including ARM’s recently
released mbed IoT device platform. In fact, towards the
end of last year, we won a Best in Show Award at ARM’s
TechCon 2014 conference. Extending our operating
environment down to the actual device chip and OS gives
developers and users a huge advantage in creating a
▼
“Underpinning the wot.io data exchange services
is our bip.io Web Automation platform which
offers access to over 50 data services.” Tom Gilley
Tom Gilley is chief technical officer and founder
Reproduced from M2M Now Magazine

4. 52 M2M Now - February / March 2015
seamless, highly secure and friction-free basis
from which to build.
M2M Now: And what of the products and
applications that you’ve integrated into your
marketplace?
TG: As I said earlier, there are currently over 50
data services available and we’re continuing to
add to them. As an indication of the breadth of
the portfolio already assembled, we announced
at the start of this year seven new data services
from Elasticsearch, Jinfonet Software, Kibana,
MongoDB, Pentaho, Apache Solr and SQLstream.
These offer an incredibly wide set of tools and
functionalities to developers and users, including
business intelligence and data visualisation, and
real time data analytics – and we support
streaming data in our framework, search engines,
databases, data mining, and dashboards.
M2M Now: While the IoT world is extending its
reach into our private, public and work lives at
an astounding speed, much of this is going on
below the waterline of most people’s
awareness. Even when some new functionality
or service suddenly pops up in their workplace,
on their smartphone, in their connected car or
in their increasingly smart home, it’s usually
greeted with a ‘I never knew that it could do
that….”. What does however instantly attract
their attention – and varying levels of concern –
is when some big story about customer data or
identities being hacked or stolen hits the media.
What’s wot.io’s view on the growing security
challenges involved in keeping the world’s data
and devices safe?
TG: For a start, security and wider risk
management strategies have to be built in to any
company operating in this interconnected
environment right from the start. Each new
boundary – between all the companies, systems,
databases, applications and devices involved –
must be protected and, on top of that, the human
environment must also be taken into account.
You can have the best systems security in place
but, as the US government has already found, a
disgruntled employee can easily defeat that.
What’s especially critical is realising that these
potential problems are not going to be solved by
individual companies operating in isolation and
instead is going to require a collaboration across
the entire value chain of vendors, suppliers and
operators. End customer education is also going
to be important.
That said, those involved in the connected device
space are now more than ever creating products
with device management solutions that are based
on industry standards that have included security
as a fundamental building block right from their
earliest design. Examples of these that wot.io is
intimately involved with include AllJoyn from the
AllSeen Alliance and ARM’s mbed platform.
Data is fast becoming the critical defining asset
of businesses in the 21st century as industry and
commerce move away from traditional models of
plant and resource ownership. It’s wot.io’s job and
responsibility to offer our customers and partners
a choice of secure device management solutions,
as well as access control and data security
vendor applications as integral parts of our data
exchange service.
INTERVIEW
“There are
currently over
50 data services
available and
we’re continuing
to add to them.”
Tom Gilley
Semi&Module
Enterprise
Horizontal
Consortium
Proprietary(thousands)
Smart City
Industrial
Oil & Gas
Healthcare
3rd party Applications
Marketplace
of 3rd
party Data
Applications
3rd
party IoT and
M2M Platforms
AMQP
HTTPWebSockets
UDP/TCP
XMPP
MQTTCo
AP
wot.ioro
uting engine and m
e
ssagebus
Application Programmers Interfaces
ConnectedDevicePlatform
DataServicesExchange
Device Management Platform
Authorization &
Authentications
Service
Cloud
wot.io Routing
Engine
Da
taflow
Fra
m
ework
Metering
&
Monitoring
Discovery
Managem
ent
Building Automation
Wellness
Retail
Reporting
Scripting
Device Management as a Service
Big Data Store
Hosting
Stream Processing
3r y Appartd p3r licationsy Applications
App
rd
of 3
Mar
lications
aty Dartprd
laceetpkMar
aat
lace
pppp
AAp
a
PCCP
T//T
PDDP htthuutAAu
rgorPnooniiottiaat
ccaiiclli
ppl
ppp
c
PQMA
itaziroh
affarrfeerttenIInsrrsemma
sees
cce
e
App
ivrrveerSasaastnnteenmeem
licationsApp
eccei
lications
airtsudnI
CtramSSm
l
yttyiCCi
PP
MlCCl
PDDP
UUD
t
gneen
gnng
tiiinttin
uut
oo
u
rro
oiio.tt.
nnt
een
mm
e
eem
gge
aag
nnaaMMa
duud
ooulloCCl
htthuutAAu
htthuutAAu
o
begge
aag
ssa
sss
ee
s
mm
e
dnaenig
ccossciis
DDi
snns
oiiottiacitneh &noiiotaziroh
i
PTTHHT
evoovccossc
eciicvreer
SSe
vreerSattaaat
D
D
egaagnnaaanMMaecceiveevD
oH
maertS
meem
gnitso
gnissecorPm
rachtlltaeH
saG&liO
otuutAAu
er
s
noittiaatmo
PMX
M
roorttoiitnnioonM
M
M
ow
gnng
iinrri
oorttoiit
&
gg
&
nngiinrrieertteeetM
m
sub
woflflo
aafl
tta
aa
t
DDa
e
oSSo
beeb
WWe
yreer
krrkowwo
eew
mm
ewo
ggenngahcxEseci
piiprriccrSSc
aDgiB
gnngiinttip
erotSata
g
nllnllleel
W
otuutAAugniddilldiiluuiB
laiiilaail
tta
sssseesnne
mo
oCCo
P
i
AAP
oo
A
CCo
gnEEn
Roiio.tt.owwo
T
m
TTTQQTM
aa
m
rra
FFr
D
en
gniintuoR
stts
eet
kke
cck
o
m
niinttirrtoorpeepRRe
gnng
g
iaaittaeet
RRe
la
e
elleuulddu
)ss)ddsnndaan
m
la
M2M Platf
artprd
3
msorM2M Platf
anTTy Ioart
ms
and
immi
eemSSe
atnoziroH
esirprrpetnE
doMMo
&immi
eem
assauusohtth((t
muitrosnoC
atnoziroH
ohtth((tyraarttaeetirripprporP
Reproduced from M2M Now Magazine