IoT isn’t about 5G, it’s about events and edge computing. A recent story on Rigado’s “edge-as-a-service” is a more realistic take on what IoT means, but is it a full-on example of a winning IoT approach? I have to confess that another “as-a-service” positioning raises my hackles, but we’ll have to look at it, and measure it against other news and trends, to see if there’s value.
We already have IoT, in what is probably the dominant sense of the term. Many homes and offices have security, environmental monitoring, and industrial or other control systems deployed today. Nearly all of them are based on a controller that talks with applications using the Internet and WiFi, combined with a local wired or wireless protocol that talks to sensors and controllers.
There are huge advantages to this approach. Sensor technology is highly cost-sensitive, and providing a sensor with 5G, Internet, and security/governance elements means jacking up the price from thirty bucks or so to perhaps five to ten times that. One large provider of smart home technology told me they sell fifty times as many low-cost non-Internet devices as those that are actually Internet-connected. Even where no special sensor protocol is used, WiFi and not cellular are the most common technologies.
The model I’ve described provides the features necessary for virtually any “private facility” IoT application out there, and I don’t think that model is going to change just because somebody deploys 5G. There’s no reason for it to, because it provides what people want, at the lowest possible cost and lowest risk. You can put a lot more security into a controller than into a sensor without breaking the bank.
A controller, in this context, is a gadget that can talk short-range wired or wireless protocols, including things like X10, Insteon, Zigbee, Bluetooth, and WiFi, to connect with devices on premises, and then provide a combination of local processing and Internet access. There are controllers that meet these requirements offered by many companies already, and widely used. You can buy a system in many local retail stores.
These controllers are in a cloud sense, an “edge”. There is no practical way to provide connections via local protocols without a device on premises to do that, but it would be possible to dumb down that device and pair it with cloud intelligence. If that intelligence offered local sensor/controller abstractions via API, you could consider it “edge-as-a-service” in at least the IoT context. Since this is a pretty accurate picture of what Rigado provides, their marketing/positioning claim is fair.
The best way to build a controller, and in fact the way some are already built, is to combine an embedded-control device with local compute power and sensor/controller protocol support, with deeper processing via APIs. That way, you have the option of hosting some basic processes on the controller to shorten the control loop and ensure that you have control during periods when you may lose Internet access. What separates Rigado from the others is less the specific technology of the controller than a combination of positioning and the set of tools and features (which they package as the “Cascade” solution, their real “edge-as-a-service” offering) to enable cloud application integration, security, and compliance. You can cloud-extend both their basic controller and their more programmable one.
In my view, Rigado’s approach is useful mainly to either OEMs who want to build IoT applications or to large enterprises who are prepared to custom-develop their own facility/industrial control. That’s not a bad thing, though. The IoT market is likely to be dominated by specialty providers who exploit tools and hardware to build applications that then target end users. Residential IoT is an example of this, of course.
Cascade integrates with Amazon, including AWS Lambda, their functional-programming event-processing toolkit. Obviously the idea is to use the IoT gateway as an event source to Lambda, which is one of the technical differentiators of the Rigado approach versus other controllers. You build two-tier applications that can cede as much event control to the cloud as you’d like.
This is one of two possible edge models for IoT; the other model would be to extend cloud-specific process hosting (AWS Lambda, in this case) out of the cloud and into the edge. Amazon’s Greengrass offers that capability, and as far as I can see, Cascade doesn’t include that. It’s not a crippling problem in a functional sense because most users would be just as comfortable (or more comfortable) writing controller apps in another language anyway. What could be a crippling problem is that cloud providers can easily extend their event strategy to the premises, and if that were to happen then firms like Rigado would be competing with the provider of part of their solution.
Amazon has, in other areas like unified communications and collaboration, seemed to focus on being a supplier to specialized OEMs rather than a provider of direct end-user solutions. That might continue in the IoT space, but remember that Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all dabbling in direct sales of event-based and IoT services. What’s Amazon’s strategy matters less than what the overall competitive dynamic would turn out to be. If Microsoft or Google field a device (and remember that they both make devices), would Amazon (who also makes devices) sit back and wait to see what happens?
The other risk for Rigado is the rest of the controller/IoT marketplace. I know of four or five vendors who offer controllers that have nearly identical features, but they’ve so far not positioned their capability in the same way Rigado has. If they were to start to offer extended functionality via cloud hosting (perhaps in partnership with an Amazon competitor) they would put a lot of pressure on the space. Some of them have been around for a decade, have a large installed base and good distribution channels. Unlike Rigado, they don’t seem to be aiming at an OEM space themselves.
What Rigado represents is a recognition of IoT reality, not a totally new approach or new technology. The important thing about the story is that it might show that the “real” side of IoT is going to get some ink from major industry news sites, and that could shift the IoT market emphasis in a real, helpful, direction.