The Eclipse Foundation announces a new collaboration between Internet of Things (IoT) industry leaders to develop interoperable IoT components that can be deployed to a Cloud platform. Bosch Software Innovations, Eurotech and Red Hat will be the initial participants in the collaboration. The collaboration will be part of the existing Eclipse IoT Working Group, a community of 26 open source IoT projects, hosted by the Eclipse Foundation.

IoT platform components provide capabilities that are useful for developing and managing IoT solutions. These commonly include components to implement secure, reliable communication between devices and services, manage and update devices, work with device data and integrate device information into existing enterprise applications. Such components may also be delivered as services on top of an underlying cloud infrastructure platform, like Cloud Foundry or OpenShift.

The initial release of the Eclipse Kapua source code, contributed by Eurotech and Red Hat, is the first important milestone on the roadmap of this collaboration. Eclipse Kapua offers a core integration framework and an initial set of modular components for device registry, device management, message routing, data management, and application enablement. As a next step, Eclipse Hono, a Bosch Software Innovations-initiated project that enables secure, reliable communication between devices and services, will be integrated as an extension to Kapua.

In the future it is expected that other Eclipse IoT projects, other open source projects and commercial vendors will provide additional components that integrate with Kapua and Hono. This will lead to an ecosystem of IoT platform core components that work well together and that can be used to bootstrap IoT applications and solutions.

The work will be done through the Eclipse IoT Working Group and the Eclipse IoT open source projects. Other organizations are welcome and encouraged to join the collaboration.

In parallel, GE Digital, which recently joined the Eclipse Foundation, has proposed a new project called Eclipse ACS. Eclipse ACS implements a simple, granular access control framework that makes it possible for IoT developers to integrate access control security into their IoT applications.