At the M2M Evolution conference in Las Vegas last week, RacoWireless announced their new Omega DevCloud IoT platform.

It is rare that I talk about cloud solutions, since in most cases I feel such things are focusing in on the ante and not the entire pot. In this case, though, it brings home what is happening all over the Web and the reason why we need to highlight the changes that join worlds together.

The day before the RacoWireless’ announcement, we talked a lot at M2M Evolution about OneM2M and the effort to deliver useful standards to the IoT/M2M community.  And like all good telco standards, the documentation is extensive and exhausting and — I must say — incomplete.  Much of the work is centered on backward compatibility. Web standards, though, are entirely different beasts.  The drivers for the standards are workable code, but more importantly the innovation has little concern for feature interaction and interference.  Or in simpler terms, you are not bound by the limits of the network and can go beyond it. For much of IoT/M2M, though, the sensors managed have been subject to the limitations of element management associated with the platforms.

The significance of the Omega DevCloud announcement is that the telecom standards and the platform limitations are bypassed in favor of giving the developer direct access to the sensors via their specific RESTFUL APIs and the JSON framework. Thus, direct app development to the sensors can be put in place that keeps the developer in their own sandbox rather than suffering telecom java (not script) and platform APIs.  

It may be that standards work will add value in the future, however today I have to say that I like the fact that Raco Wireless has brought the focus back to the developers.

Also at the show, during the press announcement, Raco ireless built the sensors Restful API and the App during the 15-minute presentation and I expect that many applications in the future will work in just this way.  A developer will decide he needs to include information from a resource and the data will be integrated into their web development as if he was using a piece of code from GitHub. Very impressive. At the same time, it also makes it so that access to the tools will just be part of the mix.

My congratulations to RacoWireless. I believe that others feel the enthusiasm I do, as indicated by various articles in the press highlighting the offering.