Alcatel-Lucent Acquires Mformation for IOT Security and Device Management

17 September 2015 – Alcatel-Lucent today announced the acquisition of Mformation, a leading provider of mobile and ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) security and device management solutions for mobile operators, service providers and enterprises. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Mformation, headquartered in Woodbridge, NJ, will be incorporated into Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Platforms organization, providing service providers and enterprises with a secure, scalable, application-independent IoT security and control platform for use across multiple industries including automotive, healthcare, utilities, manufacturing and the digital home.

Additionally, Mformation’s products will extend and enhance the capabilities of Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution to provide service providers with an integrated device management solution across home, mobile and enterprise networks. These end-to-end capabilities can address the increasing importance of the effective management and security for the 70 billion devices expected to connect to the Internet by 2020, and will simplify the management of converged networks expected to grow exponentially with the implementation of 5G.

Security concerns are on the rise as networks become increasingly virtualized, wireless devices become mainstay components of complex machines pervasive in every aspect of life, and unmanned connected devices become increasingly pervasive. The combination of Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive portfolio and Mformation together will allow network operators to manage endpoints and gateways, establishing an end-to-end IoT “chain of trust” built on industry best practices for authentication and data and network security.

“As connected devices become an ever increasing part of our social and economic fabric, we need to ensure that these devices, and the networks they navigate, are secure, reliable and efficient,” said Bhaskar Gorti, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s IP Platforms (left). “Mformation’s cloud-enabled IoT platform will enable our customers to rapidly deploy IoT services that can be trusted and managed efficiently,”

“Our portfolio and our customer base are highly complementary to Alcatel-Lucent’s Internet of Things aspirations,” said Dr. Rakesh Kushwaha, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mformation (above right). “We look forward to leveraging our mobile and IoT security capabilities to enable customers to fully exploit the benefits of a connected world.”

About Alcatel-Lucent
Alcatel-Lucent is the leading IP networking, ultra-broadband access and cloud technology specialist. We are dedicated to making global communications more innovative, sustainable and accessible for people, businesses and governments worldwide. Our mission is to invent and deliver trusted networks to help our customers unleash their value. Every success has its network.

About Mformation
Founded in 1999, Mformation is a pioneer and leader in mobility management solutions with more than 20 service provider customers around the world and managing more than 500 million devices.

Mformation provides service providers with a secure, scalable, application-independent IoT control platform that provides control and security across multiple industries including automotive, healthcare, utilities, manufacturing and the digital home.

Mformation provides service providers with deep technical expertise in device management standards and innovation in IoT protocol adaptation for connected devices.

Source: Alcatel-Lucent

Onstream to Receive $2m from Traynor Family Enterprise

3 August 2015 — Onstream, a device intelligence framework provider, is receiving $2 million in funding from Traynor Family Enterprise, a Nevada-based holding company that has backed various technology and industrial ventures, including HawsTEC, Brita® Hydration Stations®, and Cirrus Systems.

Onstream’s device intelligence framework is designed for OEMs and solution providers who want to drive intelligence, responsive behavior, and new product features to networks of smart devices. Onstream’s system activates the brain of each device, creating intelligence close to the device. The framework drives device behavior through a bi-directional communication loop that is completely customizable by the OEM or solution provider.

For companies wanting to do more than just stream data to some distant database, Onstream closes the loop on device intelligence, instantly automating and optimizing device behavior.

“The vast economic promise of device intelligence is still just unrealized potential for many of the companies best positioned to benefit from the Internet of Things (IoT),” said Craig Macy, chief executive officer of Onstream (above). “Onstream is an easily deployable, flexible framework that can solve IoT technology challenges for companies, and create immediate value from streaming data as soon as it leaves the device."

The funding from Traynor Family Enterprise will accelerate the development and optimization of Onstream’s full line of device intelligence products, including Onstream’s proprietary Redirect Service, which allows device owners to conditionally pre-process and stream connected device data to multiple destinations, and to completely control where data is stored and what types of data are instantly processed.

“Onstream’s unique technology, strong market position and experienced team immediately make it a powerful player in the fast-growing world of device intelligence and IoT ,” said Tom White, CEO of Traynor Family Enterprise. “We’re excited to partner with Onstream on a device intelligence framework that has obvious applications for companies seeking to wring more value out of their device data.”

Select clients have already tested and deployed Onstream. Cirrus Systems, a mining solutions provider, uses Onstream as the intelligence backbone for their traffic control and monitoring system that prioritizes, automates and monitors mining traffic to increase efficiency and safety, while reducing vehicle wear.

Onstream has applications in development across numerous industries, including mining, fitness, and wine. Competitive advantages include out-of-the-box device intelligence, flexible deployment, and low latency.

About Onstream
Onstream enables OEMs and solution providers to enrich their products into differentiated, feature-rich, configurable intelligent devices. Onstream provides seamless user interface to control the behavior of devices by setting conditions and intelligent actions. Onstream streams data through a bi-directional loop that interacts equally well with the cloud, fog or local networks. Learn more at http://www.onstream.io.

Source: Onstream

Wind River Delivers Real-Time Virtualisation for IoT Device Development

28 July 2015 – Wind River®, a global leader in delivering software for the Internet of Things (IoT), has announced a major update to its real-time virtualisation offering that allows customers to further reduce cost and innovate connected devices. The update includes storage virtualisation capabilities, enhanced security capabilities, and expanded processor support.

Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks® is based on Wind River virtualisation technology and extends the scalability capabilities of VxWorks by integrating a real-time embedded, Type 1 hypervisor into the core of the real-time operating system (RTOS). Through embedded virtualisation, it allows VxWorks customers to consolidate multiple disparate workloads on a single processor. Critical in today's era of IoT, it helps to address the need for robust, safer and more secure partitioning across all market segments.

“Virtualisation is a key attribute in GE’s global vision for industrial control systems in the era of the Industrial Internet. It allows the GE businesses to combine their real-time control logic, HMI, security, and cloud connectivity into a single platform,” said Wes Skeffington, principal engineer at GE. “Wind River’s virtualisation offering provides the right attributes like scalability, storage virtualisation, real-time behavior, virtual machine isolation, and security capabilities to realize this vision.”

Updates to Virtualization Profile for VxWorks include the following:

• Storage virtualisation through VirtIO allows devices to share a single storage controller, even a single disk, such as a Serial ATA device between multiple virtual machines (VMs), thereby dramatically reducing cost and complexity for consolidated systems. The run-time configuration, combined with support for the VirtIO device virtualisation framework makes the virtualisation profile a flexible and highly customizable virtualisation layer for embedded devices.
• Enhanced security capabilities include seamless integration with the Security Profile for VxWorks. These capabilities help customers to guard security from power-on all the way through VM load and beyond with secure boot, secure load, and data encryption during transmission and after shutdown.
• Expanded processor support includes support for Intel® Atom and Celeron architectures, providing even greater choices for customers to build product lines that scale from low end controllers to major gateways and high performance compute and display stations.

“Embedded virtualization allows customers to meet the challenges of the IoT era; it enables a future-proof architecture that can adapt and evolve to meet changing market requirements, customer needs, and technology advancements,” said Dinyar Dastoor, vice president and general manager of operating system platforms at Wind River (above). “With these latest virtualisation and security capability enhancements, Wind River has further strengthened VxWorks as the leading RTOS for IoT where connectivity, scalability and the ability to develop safer and more secure environments are paramount.”

The Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks is an integral part of the Intel Industrial Solutions System Consolidation Series, a production-ready, virtualisation software stack used for running an assortment of industrial and IoT workloads on a single platform.

More information about Virtualisation Profile for VxWorks is available at http://tinyurl.com/VxWorksVirtualization. And to learn more about how Wind River is addressing the opportunities and challenges of IoT, visit http://tinyurl.com/WindHelix.

About Wind River
Wind River, a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC), is a global leader in delivering software for the Internet of Things. The company has been pioneering computing inside embedded devices since 1981, and its technology is found in more than 2 billion products. Wind River offers a comprehensive portfolio of solutions for addressing the system-level challenges and opportunities of IoT that is backed by world-class global professional services, award-winning customer support, and a broad partner ecosystem. Wind River delivers the software and expertise that enables the innovation and deployment of safe, secure, and reliable intelligent systems. To learn more, please visit www.windriver.com.

Source: Wind River