Blogging at 30k': IoT 2014

I'm headed to the IoT 2014 conference where I'll be talking about Microsoft's portfolio of IoT solutions and demonstrating Nitrogen.

The brief version of what I'm presenting is that Microsoft has been in the IoT space since before it was popular -- we have created and deployed technology that runs manufacturing assembly lines, ATMs, medical devices, and all sorts of other "Things" connected by this fancy "Internet".

We are also a large organization with a large ecosystem of partners, customers, and other players. I'm learning about these pieces as fast as I can -- but I won't lie, it feels overwhelming sometimes. What that means is that we can't produce a one-size-fits-all solution for the IoT space, indeed, I believe it's premature for anyone to try. So what we have is a variety of solutions -- I'll briefly describe the three I'll be talking about this week:

  1. Integrated Systems Service (ISS) - A hosted service and set of software libraries and tools that let partners fully within the Microsoft ecosystem built a scalable robust solution for their IoT devices.

  2. Reykjavik - A solution authored by Clemens Vasters, which is a self-hosted (in Azure) solution for folks within the .Net ecosystem. The intent is to provide this as an open source solution.

  3. Nitrogen - Both a hosted (Nitrogen) and self-hosted solution written in NodeJS. It's apache 2.0 licensed and available on github.

I'll be at the IoT'14 conference talking about how we're trying to address the different needs of the wide variety of organizations and individuals in the IoT space. I'll also be talking about my recent work with the IoT focused cohort of the MS Ventures Seattle Accelerator. I've been working with these 10 startups to identify which solution makes the most sense for their use case and help build out their infrastructure to prepare for their December 14th demo day / launch. I'll also get a chance to work with one of these companies, WallFlower, at their corporate headquarters in Cambridge.

Looking forward to a busy, but awesome weeks. If you are at the conference or in Cambridge, drop me a line -- I'm happy to talk about what we're doing.