Enabling the Internet of Things - OpenText Developer · Enabling the Internet of Things The number of connected things in the world is expected ... enabling IoT scenarios with high

P R O D U C T O V E R V I E W INTERNET OF THINGS

T H E C O V I S I N T P L A T F O R M

Enabling the Internet of ThingsThe number of connected things in the world is expected to exceed 20 billion by 2020 (Gartner) and the sheer volume of identities will grow in parallel. A connected product to a manufacturer means building a better, more valuable or sticky product and unlocking new service-based revenue models. A connected asset to an owner/operator is a means to increase operational effi ciency and improve services by optimizing the use of the asset.

The challenge is that IoT has an Identity problem – there is a need to deliver trusted information to many mission critical stakeholders. Need to make it possible for own-ers and operators of product ecosystems to create and manage a network of physical objects that securely connect, communicate, collect data and intelligently distribute this data to create value.

Anatomy of a connected device ecosystem

A connected device ecosystem is often more vast than one might think, serving many more stakeholders than apparent to the untrained eye. Looking at a connected soda dispenser at a restaurant as an example: all stakeholders in the ecosystem benefi t from connectivity. Connectivity enables them to consume information and act intelligently before an event occurs.

COVISINT PLATFORM:

• 2,000+ Global Customers

• 212K+ Connected Organizations

• 30M+ User Identities

• 4B+ Yearly Transactions

• $1T+ in Transacted Business


T H E C O V I S I N T P L A T F O R M

The machine itself can send messages to a system that mon-itors machine health and maintenance can be performed in advance of any failures, enabling the restaurant to sell as many beverages as possible. Additionally, distributors can be notified that the machine is running low on syrup, and should be refilled before any ingredients run out completely. The restaurant can track delivery of products in real time. The beverage company can better plan production and distribution with accurate visibility into demand.

Connecting people, systems and things enables operational agility across the value chain.

The Covisint PlatformLike organizations, people, applications and devices have a broad spectrum of attributes – these entities and their relationships need to be carefully managed. The Covisint Platform standardizes how these device identities are represented; making sure that the highest level of integrity can be maintained at scale. Common entity definitions allow for consistent identity relationship behavior, versioning, and extensibility.

Connected ecosystem of people, applications and things, requires intimate knowledge and expertise in each of the areas described in this brief. Not only that, but it also requires the ability to purchase, code, and maintain a string of components. Industry leaders understand that connecting the myriad of people, systems and things that touch the value chain can have a profound positive impact on business. They have also come to realize that piecing a solution together with multiple standalone components or building it themselves would take a considerable amount of time and resources – often more than they have to spare – resulting in something that is error-prone, challenging to manage and not easily scalable.

Alternately, these solutions can be developed using a cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to manage entities and their relationships, the lifecycle of all connected entities, the orchestration of device data streams, and messaging for integration of device and application data. The Covisint Platform was purpose-built to do this and has gained notoriety for its reliability, massive scalability and for enabling operational agility. With this platform, the enterprise can easily unlock customer and partner led development, and innovate

quickly in the application layer.

The Covisint Platform has evolved a great deal since its inception as the world’s largest B2B exchange and since enabling companies like General Motors to monetize vehicle telematics – providing car owners with convenient services through OnStar, the world’s first consumer-facing connected car experience. Today, this Platform-as-a-Service combines all of the foundational technologies required for any IoT initiative, and the tools to get started quickly.

Covisint’s identity-centric approach to IoT is what makes this platform in particular both unique and highly complementary to other platforms in the marketplace.

• This platform comes with advanced out-of-the-box identity and access management functionality, which would otherwise have to be built from scratch – typically consuming 20-40% of development time for IoT initiatives.

• Messaging and orchestration services provide the integration layer for transporting customer data and integrating across devices and systems eliminating the complexity of creating and syndicating integrations for machine-to-machine, machine-to-people, or machine-to-application scenarios.

• IoT services enable:

• Management of device lifecycle at all stages – tracking and authorizing devices as they are provisioned, registered, activated, locked, unlocked, suspended, unsuspended, deleted, and reset.

• Fine-grained audit and tracking, for every event

Custom AppsDev UX Tools B2E Solutions B2B Solutions B2P Solutions B2C Solutions

APIs & Developer Resources

Messaging & Orchestration

Identity & AccessManagement

Internet of Things


www.covisint.comAll OpenText products and services listed within are trademarks of OpenText Corp. All other company or product names are trademarks of their respective owners. ©2017 OpenText Corp.

associated with a device, provide complete transparency across the ecosystem.

• Rapid development and deployment of IoT projects using templates.

• This platform is much more secure and scalable than any other platform, providing autonomous authentication, authorization and interaction between entities.

• This infrastructure-agnostic architecture is built on Cloud Foundry which allows for solutions to scale dynamically, ingest data rapidly, upgrade with no downtime and run on any IaaS.

This brief covers the scope of Covisint’s IoT services. These capabilities make it possible to isolate, manage and orchestrate device behavior and model for security.

IoT services accelerate secure, scalable connected solutions

Getting started is easy with Covisint’s IoT services. Services include advanced profi le management that helps to catalog and defi ne templates for re-use, tools to manage the lifecycle of devices and the relationships that they have to other devices, people and systems, as well as Internet-scale IoT messaging functionality. Managing and operating an IoT ecosystem securely would be impossible to do without these capabilities, and extremely challenging to build from scratch.Profi le management – defi ne device profi les and leverage templates for bulk creation and update. Unlike other IoT services providers, Covisint makes it possible to create templates for devices, events, commands and even entire

solutions. Templates make it easy to onboard new devices quickly, catalog attributes for future use and they allow users to instantiate entire solutions based on prior models that have proven to be eff ective.

• Catalog management – defi ning the taxonomy of the solution and representing it as a catalog of universal attributes that can be applied to devices, events and commands.

• Attribute type – metadata or properties applicable to devices.

• Templates – collection of attributes, commands and evets to create devices. A device based on a template will inherit all attribute, command and event properties.

• Device template – collection of attributes applicable to a device.

• Event template – collection of attributes applicable to an event that a device can produce.

• Command template – collection of attributes applicable to a command that a device can act on.

• Solution templates – templates of complete solutions, consisting of all attributes, commands and events associated with devices, for simple reuse in future projects and rapid deployment. For example, a solution template can represent a connected farm or connected vehicle.



• Device management – creation and management of devices in the ecosystem which includes a registry that makes it possible to instantiate, track and maintain metadata related to a device.

• Rules – robust engine that enables real time decision-making based on events and device lifecycle.

Relationship & Lifecycle Management – register, authenticate and authorize interaction across the entire lifecycle of people, systems and things. The ability to manage the identity of a device throughout its lifecycle is critical to security across the entire ecosystem. The ability to manage the relationship that a device has with anyone or anything that it interacts with is what makes Covisint uniquely qualified to handle IoT initiatives requiring the highest level of security.

• Registration – instantiation of a device based on a device template.

• Authentication – authenticate devices by issuing credentials and/or certificates.

• Authorization – define authorization policies to manage devices and interactions in the ecosystem. Manage subscription and publication of streams. Dynamic security context provides fine-grained authorization policies down to the command level of the device.

• Lifecycle management – devices have lifecycle states associated to them and they can transition from state to state either automatically or through workflows/commands. Manage metadata and audit data associated with changes in entity lifecycle and authorizations over time.

• Relationship management – manage interactions between devices, systems and things, across ecosystems. Create and manage subscriptions to device and application streams.

IoT messaging – internet-scale stream processing engine for sending events and commands across devices, systems and processes with workflow and stream analytics. Advanced messaging capabilities are key to all IoT ecosystems, and especially those in which mission critical functions are performed. Unlike other IoT service providers, Covisint enables protocol brokerage and fine-grained traceability of messages.

• Stream processing – event data hub and processing engine to receive multiple streams of data in different protocols through a broker, persist the data, apply business logic and route it to the right recipient (application), enabling IoT scenarios with high number of device messages processed in real time. Employs pub-sub

model, an emerging standard paradigm, for messaging where an IoT platform publishes the data into a public queue and the applications which are subscribed to that queue may access the data.

• Device presence – messaging framework for device states (offline/online) and the logic associated to the transition between the states.

• Protocol brokerage – protocol brokering and support for legacy and/proprietary device communication technologies.

• MQTT – a lightweight messaging protocol for small sensors and mobile devices, optimized for high-latency or unreliable networks.

• JMS and MOM – a Java message API that allows communication between different components of a distributed application to be loosely coupled, reliable and asynchronous. The platform uses it to allow applications to subscribe to public queues and consume IoT events/data.

• HTTP 1.1 – an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.

• Websockets – a protocol providing full-duplex communication channels over a single TCP connection.

• STOMP – a simple text-based protocol, designed for working with MOMs, providing an interoperable wire format that allows STOMP clients to talk with any message broker supporting the protocol.

• AMQP – an open standard message queuing application layer protocol for MOMs.

• TCP/UDP – transport layer protocols built on top of internet protocol.

• Custom application protocol service – allows for creation of a custom application protocol on top of any IP stack based protocol, such as, UDP, TCP, HTTP, and FTP.

• Encryption and decryption – payload level encryption/decryption for high to low range. Ciphers are supported at 256, 128 and 96 bit and include AES PSK, Simon PSK, Speck PSK.

• Events and commands – event and command processing with acknowledgements. Event based rules execution that triggers commands, notifications and message delivery to



enterprise systems.

• Real-time analytics – ability to apply statistical aggregators to multiple data points from stream and device metadata in real time and the ability to generate rules based on analysis.

• Trace and audit – fi ne grained traceability of messages for troubleshooting, audit and billing. Ability to replay IoT messaging and to capture any transactions or system state changes and make them available for audit.

• Transformation – the ability to transform any data format for validation, mapping, pre-processing, data enrichment and post-processing.

The building blocks of a complete IoT solutionCarlito operates an IoT ecosystem of connected assets, fi eld operators and the devices that they use. He needs to be able to add additional assets to his ecosystem, connect them to fi eld operators, and apply rules for health monitoring purposes.

Confi gure/Build: He starts by logging into his

dashboard where he can manage templates for easy onboarding of

new assets/devices, monitor existing ones, and manage the relationships between assets, other devices and

fi eld operators.

Integrate: Carlito uses Covisint APIs to

integrate the applications and systems that he and his fi eld

operators use to interact with diff erent assets.



Manage: Carlito not only has the ability to

manage the ecosystem as a whole, but he has fi ne-grained control over

individual assets. Using the platform, he can closely manage the identities

of people, systems and things in their varying states within a lifecycle. He can set up commands and work-fl ows to transition assets and other

devices from state to state

Operate: Carlito can closely monitor the

messages being sent and received throughout the ecosystem. With

these advanced tracking capabilities, he has insight into the fl ow of data

between all connected people, sys-tems and things transacted through

the Platform, at any level.



ConclusionWith Identity at the center of almost every Internet of Things initiative, a platform that enables rapid development around the identity of things, is essential. Advanced profi le management, lifecycle and relationship management, and IoT messaging are the pivotal components needed to make IoT useful to businesses. Covisint’s IoT Services make it easy to isolate, manage and orchestrate device behavior and model for security.

Analyze: Carlito benefi ts from advanced

real-time analytics for a high level look at all operations as they’re

occurring, making it easy to track down bottlenecks and assess overall

operational health.

Scale & Manage Entity Hierarchies: As his IoT ecosystem grows, Carlito

can visualize and manage the hierarchies of people, system and

things. He can onboard new assets quickly using templates that allow him

to apply the same attributes to new, similar assets. He is also able to easily

manage access controls for groups within an ecosystem.

The Covisint Platform provides technologies that allow you to register and manage physical things and create solutions that connect people and systems with the integrated world. Covisint’s IoT services encompass everything needed to monitor the health of products and equipment to create secure interactions and integrations, and manage the identity lifecycle of connected things.

Documents

Enabling the Internet of Things - OpenText Developer · Enabling the Internet of Things The number of connected things in the world is expected ... enabling IoT scenarios with high