My friend Phil sent me a link to a Gartner article listing the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015” and I wasn’t surprised to see the “Internet of Things” at number two.

Now that mobile computing has become ubiquitous, there is a rush to network connect everything. Plus, there is a lot of money in it – take a look at the Nest acquisition. I’m not really certain this is a Good Thing™. My experience with low end network devices shows that corners that can be cut often are (i.e. crappy SNMP agents) and my guess is that in this rush to get things out the door we will end up with some serious issues.

One thing that can circumvent this is open source. By making the code transparent, especially for medical devices, there is a strong chance that major issues could be identified and corrected.

If, and that is a big “if”, we could get people to standardize around various open source software for the IoT there is a chance we can prevent the “Internet of Silos”. I first heard that term in a BBC article where it was announced that ARM (a British company) was creating an open source programming language for devices powered by its chips.

As you might expect, the article was short on specifics, but if the language is any good and the license is permissive, perhaps other chip manufacturers will port it. At a minimum it should encourage companies like Intel to also open source the technology used for their chips and the community might be able to build wrappers around both of them.

No matter what happens, we hope to support any management capabilities they introduce. We are actively working on making OpenNMS almost infinitely scalable to be able to handle the needs of the IoT, from insanely fast data storage (Newts) to highly distributed polling and data collection (Minion). We hope that the open nature of the platform will encourage more and more product vendors to use OpenNMS for their element management system, and then at least on the management front we can prevent the silos.