How to turn your smart home developments into a profitable and sustainable business using OSGi
1Because of the fast growing interest in IoT, smart home solution are now becoming mainstream. We are expecting 17.4 million systems installed systems by 2017 just in Europe. Big corporates like Apple, Google, Samsung, AT&T, Deutsche Telekom are investing huge amounts of money in the development or acquisition of smart home technologies. Almost every week you can find new crowd funded projects, such as from LIFX, Canary, and SmartThings. Venture capital companies also invest in smart home startups, many of which originated in crowd funded projects.
As good as it sounds for consumers and for the smart home community in general, many of these development are proprietary. The use of standards is mainly limited to protocols (e.g. ZigBee, Z-Wave), upgrade capabilities are limited, the expandability is restricted to one vendor. In addition many available products serve a single purpose of have a very limited set of functionalities. The control of this products is usually limited to a specific smartphone or tablet application.
With this presentation we want to give an overview of best practices for building a profitable and sustainable smart home solution based on open standards, such as OSGi, HGI, etc. The proposed solution will not be limited to big corporates, but also allow smart and medium enterprises turning it into a growing ecosystem. We present an OSGi based reference architecture, introducing major building blocks, such as the OSGi Device Abstraction Layer, Remote Management System and Tooling. The presentation concludes with recommendations on how to get started to build such an OSGi-based ecosystem and how to create a developer community around it.