ThingWorx Discusses New Version Release, What Makes an M2M Platform

ThingWorx is at ITEXPO and the collocated M2M Evolution Conference & EXPO this week talking about its new release of the company’s platform. Release 5.0, which became available in mid June, features a new connectivity model based on WebSockets.

Previous versions of the ThingWorx platform were based on XMPP. John Canosa, chief strategist of connected products at ThingWorx, explained that the company embraced WebSockets with Release 5.0 because it’s based on HTTP, so is more IT friendly.

Release 5.0 also adds new security features, including matrix multitenancy, which makes it very easy for such customers as multinational companies with multiple constituencies like internal users, dealer networks, and end users, to create security models with varying levels of visibility and permissions.

ThingWorx has also implemented some improvements in terms of scalability with Release 5.0, Canosa said. The company has servers around the globe that communicate to one another via a mesh. Canosa said that’s diametrically opposed to view of IoT where bunch of devices talk to a cloud.

As discussed in the Q3 2014 issue of M2M Evolution magazine, Canosa in another recent interview with TMC said that some companies in the M2M market place have applications or applications suites, add APIs to them, and call them an M2M platform. However, Canosa believes that a platform of any type needs to have been designed from the ground up to be a platform, meaning it’s extensible by people outside of the organization that developed the platform. A platform, he added, must provide end-to-end functionality; support connectivity; allow for data collection, business rules, storage, and scalability; and allow developers to build applications on top of it quickly and easily.

“The highlight of the ThingWorx platform itself is we enable companies to build connected applications 10 times faster than using traditional development tools,” said Canosa. “That has been validated by our customers.”