>> BLACKBERRY PROJECT ION

Blackberry announced a new project yesterday specific to IoT.

Project Ion is a series of initiatives that will enable customers to realize their vision for the Internet of Things with partnerships with market leaders, an ecosystem to foster innovation and a cloud-based product from QNX solutions to enable greater levels of simplicity, scalability and security.

IoT is receiving a lot of attention these days and it seems that every major player in existence is making "land grab" opportunities to try and secure a position within the space. It is no surprise to see BlackBerry get on board - which is a good thing as they have tremendous experience dealing with security of mobile communications, a great efficient operating system and even some end-points for sensor gathering (QNX enabled cars).

Security is definitely one of the biggest concerns within the IoT space - however, as anyone will tell you; your security is limited to the weakest point in your infrastructure. BlackBerry could contribute heavily to IoT if it could position itself from end-point to end-point, very much like they succeeded with the original BlackBerry communication devices.

Lets take a look at the IoT protocol stack (credit for image within):

Project Ion definitely ticks check-boxes in the right places, which the experiences and partnerships announced prominently shown (cassandra, kafka, solr, vert.x). It would be great to get clarifications on the plans for the collection of data from sensors themselves - there have been a few discussions around the concept of an IoT operating system, such as:

• Contiki: The Open Source Operating System for IoT
• RIOT - The friendly Operating System for IoT
• FreeRTOS - Market leading RTOS

If as part of Project Ion they could provide a secure means of pushing data to the QNX cloud or even potentially introduce a low-cost point of integration similar to the likes of the arduino, raspberry pi, electric imp running a custom version of QNX embedded to connect to sensors directly and over a secure network transmit data they would be cable of completing the end-to-end puzzle and be a very serious contender in the IoT ecosystem.

Let's hope "coming soon" really is that.