A Smarter Planet needs lightweight messaging

One of the primary things I’ve been working on this year has been IBM’s new WebSphere MQ Telemetry product. I say “new”, of course, but the underlying technologies – WebSphere MQ itself, and the MQTT protocol which takes the messaging infrastructure down to the edge of the network and into embedded devices – have both been around, and totally solid, for a number of years already, but they have only recently formally been brought together into a single package. MQTT is short for MQ Telemetry Transport, and I wrote about it a couple of months ago in a post where I referred to it as a Smarter Planet protocol.

I’ve done quite a bit of travelling and talking to IBM customers and communities this year, and that’s recently been recognised and formalised into (part of) my new role in Hursley where I’m the WebSphere Messaging Community Lead. What does that mean? Well, the product part is in the first two words – I’m looking at the MQ family of products (something I’ll be writing about a bit more in the near future). The most important part, though is that third word – Community. My primary focus is working with, listening to, and helping to develop the community – and linking that back in to what we do in our labs. Community, for me, means people: developers, administrators, architects, partners, and the overall ecosystem that surrounds WebSphere MQ. We’ve got some great third-party sites out there, some brilliant content that gets published through IBM Redbooks and developerWorks, and our support teams blog about the topic, but we can always do better and I’m looking forward to finding ways of socialising our content and the materials produced by others.

A great first step towards that is our new IBM Expert network on Slideshare, which Adam Christensen wrote about recently, enabling us to share content as IBMers in a more “social” manner. I had a bunch of presentations up there already, but it was high time that I contributed some material more from my specialist technical subject area. I’ve now done so 🙂

This was a quick presentation I gave at an Apache Retreat that was held at IBM Hursley a couple of months ago. It’s a cut-down version of the full talk I’d usually give on the topic, tailored to the audience to keep it relevant to that community rather than diving into the enterprise part of the story and listing out case studies etc.. This is an important point, as the MQTT ecosystem is very much about the developer community and the opportunity to embed a reliable and lightweight messaging protocol into devices like smartphones, sensors, routers and edge-of-network boxes. It’s one of the reasons why IBM has published the specification for royalty-free implementation, and we’re seeing some exciting (and sometimes unexpected!) things happening as folks build their own client APIs. If your application or library is implementing that specification then your devices or applicaitons could, ultimately, bridge up into an Enterprise Service Bus running on the MQ infrastructure, and all the backend power that exists in clouds and enterprise datacentres today can start to do clever things with the data. Predictive analytics, visualisations, better prioritisation of resources… the reliability of transport for the data and the ability to get down to the smallest devices is vital.

[ related aside – shout-out to Nick for the lovely visual on slide 18 of this deck which I failed to credit within the presentation where I originally put it together in a bit of a rush. It’s from his page for the Arduino library for MQTT ]

There’s always more to say in this space, but I hope the presentation provides an overview of how the Smarter Planet story bridges the ideas of Service Oriented Architecture and The Internet of Things, and the part that MQTT plays within that. In the future you can expect to hear me talking more in this space, and I should be giving talks at Home Camp 3 in London in a couple of weeks’ time, as well as at LinuxConf Australia in Brisbane in January. I look forward to meeting more people and discussing the whole messaging story in more detail!