EMS Agent Bolsters IoT Software Product Portfolio

Wind River adds device-to-cloud connectivity to it’s existing software platforms and announces a professional services practice.
By Joe Desposito, Senior Editor
Today at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany, Wind River announced the further enhancement and expansion of its Wind River Helix product portfolio to address the system-level opportunities and challenges of the IoT. In addition, the company announced the formation of an IoT professional services practice to assist customers with the creation and deployment of IoT applications.
The announcement builds on the company’s Wind River Edge Management System announced last December. EMS is Wind River’s cloud-based technology stack (see Figure 1), which is an integral part of the Intel IoT Platform.

The heart of this announcement is the EMS agent shown highlighted in the red boxes in Figure 2. It shows up on both the gateway and the device. The gateway typically connects to the device if it is a “brownfield” or legacy device. If the device is a “greenfield” design, meaning that it was built from scratch to connect directly to the Internet without the need for a gateway, the agent can run directly on that device and perform those actions.

“The news today is really that we’ve enabled all of our operating environments, all of our operating systems, whether it’s VxWorks, Wind River Linux or the Wind River Intelligent Device Platform, which runs inside the gateway, to have this agent be part of their default image. So any customer of ours that is using a run time will automatically be set up to connect to the EMS,” said Ido Sarig, Vice President and General Manager, IoT Solutions Group at Wind River.
“The agent is really the piece that’s responsible for doing the device-to-the-cloud connectivity,” continued Sarig. “It does so in a secure way. It takes all the data that has been aggregated possibly on the gateway from multiple sensors and then it sends data to the cloud and receives back from the cloud control messages for a complete closed loop.”
Wind River also announced the availability of Microkernel Profile for VxWorks, a tiny-footprint RTOS intended to be used in devices that are extremely resource constrained, such as sensor hubs, microcontrollers, and wearables.
Wind River Helix is the comprehensive portfolio of Wind River products. Helix enables IoT advancements from the secure and managed intelligent devices at the edge, through gateways, across the network, and up into the cloud. To learn more about how Wind River is addressing the opportunities and challenges created by IoT, visit http://tinyurl.com/iotsite.