IoT at Red Hat Summit

Technology You Can Touch

We have been helping enterprises build and manage open hybrid clouds, and thousands have come to our Red Hat Summit and DevNation conferences in Boston this week to learn more from us and each other about how they can do that. This year, though, in addition to our regular selection of sessions, demos, and meetups, we are bringing a physical element to the Red Hat Summit by leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT). As a result, attendees are both getting a more tangible and valuable experience at the Summit as well as some literal hands-on opportunities to learn how to implement IoT solutions themselves.

Driving Datacenter Functions to the Edge

One of our strategic focuses on IoT is driving functionality and intelligence that has traditionally been the domain of datacenters and backend clouds towards edge devices through the deployment of IoT gateways. These gateways are typically computers deployed in relatively close proximity to edge devices and provide enough processing power to interact with a large range of local devices. Gateways enable robust, real-time capabilities for devices and provide services such as messaging, realtime analytics, and orchestrated automation.

Red Hat provides a broad set of software that can power the datacenter (our entire open hybrid cloud portfolio), gateways (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Storage, Red Hat JBoss Middleware), and even a range of devices (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat Mobile):

And, this architecture works together to flow data and data-oriented actions from devices to the datacenter because data is where the ultimate value of IoT resides.

IoT In Action

During our Middleware keynote at the Summit today, we are interactively demonstrating what is possible with Red Hat technologies and IoT. For example, one of the challenges many asset tracking systems have today is tracing the physical movement of objects indoors where GPS cannot provide adequate coverage. And, at an event like the Red Hat Summit where we have thousands of attendees, it can be helpful to understand the flow of people around different venues.

So, we are giving bluetooth beacons to conference attendees who want to help us track people flows throughout the Summit. These beacons will transmit data to gateways, which in turn will aggregate and send data to the cloud for analytics processing and reporting. Consequently, Red Hat Summit attendees will be able to see for themselves how Red Hat technologies can draw data from the physical world into the cloud to extract value for them.

Enabling Enterprise IoT

Enterprises need more than just a good architecture and data to deploy IoT successfully. They also need to be able to manage important capabilities such as security, reliability, and the lifecycle of devices and gateways.

Red Hat’s enterprise-quality software and management tools provide an excellent, open source foundation on which to deliver these capabilities. Many of the world’s most secure and reliable software services today run on Red Hat, and we are providing that same set of technologies for IoT.

But, you need more than just good technology to implement security or achieve reliability--you need knowledge and a good set of practices too. This year, across the Red Hat Summit and DevNation, we are providing a wealth of knowledge and training for IoT so that attendees can learn best practices for achieving enterprise requirements in IoT. For example we have:

• Many IoT-focused sessions and presentations

• An IoT Expo and Showcase Pavilion at the Red Hat Summit show floor, featuring presentations, demos, and experts from Red Hat and partners

• Customer and partner IoT panels

• Birds of a Feather IoT technical panels

Additionally, for the truly adventurous, we have an all-night IoT Hackathon where developers will be able to build their own IoT solutions using Red Hat technologies.

A Direct, Physical Connection

Open source software has been a great enabler for IoT solutions because of the value and innovation open source drives. For all of us at Red Hat, we love working with the open source community to build great software each and every day. The Red Hat Summit is a special time for us each year, though, because we get to engage with many of our customers and partners not just in the broader open source community but in a local, physical, and concentrated space.

Just as IoT is about bridging the software and physical worlds, the Red Hat Summit is a time when we can make a physical connection to bridge and interact with so many members of our software community. And, just as our digital open source communities facilitate two-way conversations around software, we hope that our Red Hat Summit event facilitates two-way conversations about software and IoT in particular. So, if you’re at the Summit or DevNation, please come by to learn about what Red Hat is doing in IoT but also to share with us what you are doing so that we can all explore this great new frontier together.