RTI Unveils Data Bus for IoT Applications

The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has defined an Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) that creates a Layered Databus pattern that it is recommending as a framework for developing multi-tiered Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Real-Time Innovations (RTI) today announced it has become one of the first providers of a connectivity software for IoT environments to implement IIRA.

David Barnett, vice president of products and markets for RTI, says version 5.3 of RTI Connext DDS will enable IT organizations to deploy IoT applications consisting of multiple interrelated services at scale.

“It provides organizations with fine-grain control over the network,” says Barnett.

IIRA is an extension of the Object Management Group (OMG) Data Distribution Service (DDS) standard that Barnett says RTI helped implement in IIRA. Because of that work, RTI had an advantage in terms of adding a data bus into RTI Connext DDS.

In general, IoT applications represent a new frontier for enterprise IT organizations. Connecting a single device to the internet is a relatively simple endeavor. But connecting thousands of IoT applications to hundreds of backend services across a network will require IT organizations to be able to precisely control which applications and services are connected to one another.

In the meantime, it’s clear that IoT projects are moving forward. The challenge is making sure the technologies required to run IoT applications are sufficiently hardened before those applications get deployed in a production environment.