Apigee, which provides a platform for application programming interface (API) integration and analytics services, has launched a new offering called Apigee Link, designed to help hardware manufacturers use APIs to connect devices to the Internet quickly and with open, widely deployed standards. Apigee Link is available today as a cloud and device software offering for select customers, and is slated to become widely available later this year.
Apigee Link provides built-in REST APIs and end-to-end connectivity for devices. “Most device makers are good at firmware and hardware, but APIs are generally outside of their comfort zone,” says Brian Mulloy, Apigee’s VP of IoT. REST APIs are built on the REpresentational State Transfer architecture, which uses strings of characters—uniform resource identifiers (URIs)—to send and receive communication instructions for resources (discrete things, rather than processes). Apigee Link provides REST APIs with which its customers can connect devices to the cloud and access them, he says, whether the devices connect to a hub, via a wireless protocol such as Wi-Fi, ZigBee or Bluetooth, or to the cloud, using a connectivity protocol such as WebSockets, HTTP or MQTT.
CentraLite, a manufacturer of wireless building-control devices ranging from thermostats to door locks to motion sensors, will be among the first Apigee customers to use Apigee Link. The company, based in Mobile, Ala., is upgrading the devices it sells to its enterprise customers in the hospitality industry, which currently employ a proprietary interface. The products, which are used as part of energy and lighting automation systems at a number of hotels and casinos, are controlled via CentraLite software.
CentraLite’s chief technology officer, John Calagaz, explains that his company’s software, due to its proprietary interface, is currently not easily integrated with its customers’ other software systems. Without integration, front-desk employees fielding calls from guests who find their rooms to be too hot or too cool, for example, must switch between the reservation system, which they use throughout the day, and the CentraLite control software. In some cases, this even requires that an employee move to a different computer, investigate the issue and then get back in touch with the guest to resolve it.
CentraLite has developed a new generation of its device-control software that uses APIs, provided and managed by Apigee, allowing its customers to quickly integrate the CentraLite software, via the Apigee cloud, into their other commonly used programs designed for, say, reservations, housekeeping and maintenance scheduling. CentraLite is currently running an alpha pilot with five existing customers and plans to release the new device software in mid-summer.
Pilot testers can view the CentraLite software through a module that is integrated into, for example, a reservation system. “Now a worker at the front desk could call up a guest’s record and see the current temperature in her room,” Calagaz explains. The employee can then quickly help the guest understand how the room’s thermostat can be set and adjusted.
According to Calagaz, Apigee Link makes it easy for developers who work for CentraLite customers to set commands for actions, such as remotely turning on a light or adjusting temperature, even if they are not experts in Bluetooth or ZigBee.
“A very small percentage of all developers actually speak the language of devices themselves,” Calagaz states. “But a lot of them understand Web services and use APIs all the time.”
Beyond this, Apigee Link could power customer-facing applications, such as enabling an authentication link between a hotel’s booking application and a guest’s reservation record, which would allow that visitor to log in via his mobile phone or computer and do such things as request that his room be set to a desired temperature when he arrives. With Apigee Link integration, the reservation app could also offer a means for the customer to use his phone to control the lighting inside the room—since recalling the locations of all light switches within a guest room can be a surprisingly vexing problem. The guest might find this feature handy for turning off all lights at once, via his smartphone, without getting out of bed.
CentraLite also manufacturers home-automation devices for SmartThings, a brand of sensor-based lighting and energy controls for home automation, as well as Lowe’s Iris line of similar products. However, it plans to offer Apigee Link as a way of helping its enterprise customers integrate device management into their enterprise systems via Web APIs.
Apigee Link was built on an open-source IoT platform called Zetta, which Mulloy says Apigee developed as a means of keeping up with the growing list of communication standards employed by new and legacy devices. Zetta utilizes a “protocol mediation” library—which is essentially a translation database—that makes it possible for the software to use open standards to stream near-real-time data between physical devices, the cloud and mobile apps.
Apigee also offers two ancillary services: Apigee Edge, an API management service, and Apigee Insights, which delivers predictive analytics regarding Big Data. Using API Edge, Mulloy says, an Apigee customer can manage its API library to ensure that commands that the APIs send between a user and IoT devices—turning lights on, setting temperatures and so forth—are properly secured, logged, optimized and analyzed. (Apigee released Apigee Edge as its flagship product in 2004, and unveiled API Insights last year.)
The company has helped a number of firms to create IoT offerings in the past. For example, it helped Walgreens to develop its QuickPrint offering, which enables customers to walk into a store and print glossy photographs directly from images taken on their mobile devices. In addition, Walgreens offers a portal at which mobile application developers can find a software development kit (SDK) and APIs that let users print photos at Walgreens locations directly from those apps. (Those app developers recive a cut of the revenue from those print sales, Mulloy says.)
Last week, Facebook-owned Parse announced that it is starting to offer developers a means of easily linking hardware to the Internet, through Parse for IoT, a line of SDKs made specifically for embedded devices.