At Light + Building in Frankfurt, Osram, one of the leading lighting companies, is showcasing an IoT platform for a strong developer community.
“With Lightelligence there is no need to reinvent the wheel when developing an application for lighting and building services”, said Thorsten Müller, Head of Innovation at Osram. “Development departments can make use of the know-how within the community. That leads to an enormous increase in efficiency in IoT development.”
Lightelligence from Osram deliberately dispenses with monolithic architectures. Instead, a flexible micro-service architecture is used that enables system and development costs to be drastically reduced. The high-tech company is targeting integration development with Lightelligence. Applications can be individually assembled from building block and basic service modules via open APIs and tailored to customer requirements. Developers can then concentrate on adding value instead of toiling on architectures. A strong developer community will also arise.
The Lightelligence platform offers a large number of micro services that can be flexibly assembled as building blocks to create individual applications. Basic functions for things such as interface monitoring, backup storage and raw data management come from technology providers – Osram has chosen Microsoft Azure as cloud platform to provide hyper-scalable infrastructure for the Lightelligence platform.
Modules that are more domain-specific, such as an innovative device management module, are also offered. An open-source adapter on the gateway selects the protocols and thus improves data flow. An ID service with single-sign-on functionality and authorization concept with different roles is available which is suitable, for example, for a lighting control application. Services for notifying employees and for integrating sensors are also provided. The rules engine contains predefined IoT rules.
Lightelligence therefore makes IoT development much simpler as complex issues of security and architecture have already been solved by experts. Implementation of common standards such as Lightweight M2M is already in place, saving developers plenty of hard work. Resources and costs are also saved by the efficient resource and data modules and the multi-tenancy architecture which serves all users with one software instance so they can all work on a common platform. The optionally integrable cloud infrastructure is made available by Microsoft Azure as an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).
Lightelligence differs from many well-known generic platforms aimed at providing a general infrastructure in that it is designed as a domain-specific platform. With this platform, Osram is building on existing infrastructures in order to concentrate on its core competences. As a leading expert in the field of lighting and building services, Osram guarantees maximum speed and agility in product development.
With Lightelligence new business models can be quickly tested and implemented. Worries about the scalability and capacity of the functions belong to the past. The developer tool of the Lightelligence platform has mechanisms that make the applications quickly scalable and at the same time robust. The applications developed on the Lightelligence platform can have very different implications, such as reducing the energy consumption of a building or an increase or increasing sales in the retail environment.
