One of the most consistently difficult challenges in IT is moving IoT workloads to the cloud. IoT vendors often send sensory data in non-interoperable or proprietary formats that cloud services are unable to recognize. The engineering work required to reformat the payloads is significant, time-consuming, and recurring. Physical on-premises IoT gateways are expensive to deploy and manage, introducing new management and security challenges.

That's not all. Embedded cloud-friendly chips and stacks work only for new IoT devices, leaving legacy devices behind and requiring design-in times that can take months or years. Data comes in various dimensions, too, such as temperature, humidity and pressure ratings – not just what one sees on a page. Thorny problems like these are commonplace.

HPE Wi-Fi maker Aruba, Microsoft, and reelyActive, a Canadian company specializing in open-source IoT solutions,  are teaming up to offer what's designed to be an automated answer for these complicated engineering problems.

Teaming Up for an Open Source Data Converter

These three have created a new open-source data converter for the Microsoft Azure cloud that allows IoT device data securely streamed from Aruba Wi-Fi access points to be used by Microsoft Power BI and other Azure applications. The SaaS components, which must be acquired separately, include the following:

The Pareto Anywhere for Azure converter reformats data and units of measurement to make them compatible with Azure applications without custom engineering. All that heavy lifting noted at the beginning of this story gets handled by automation.

"The dirty little secret in the IoT industry is this: Different devices from different vendors format their data – including things like temperature and humidity and pressure – differently," Mike Tennefoss, Aruba's VP of IoT and Strategic Partnerships, told SDxCentral. "So if you take device data from different IoT devices, and you send it into the cloud, somehow an application has to understand the format of each different device in order to be able to read the data. And that's complex.

"This new solution allows customers to send data from legacy or new IoT devices directly to Azure without adding any gateway hardware or parallel network infrastructure. If business needs change in the future, new IoT devices can be incorporated without replacing existing IT infrastructure."

The all-SaaS platform securely reformats raw IoT data streams at high speed, Tennefoss said. There are no fees or royalties involved; reelyActive subscription support is available for implementation assistance, Tennefoss said. It enables Microsoft Azure streaming analytics, Power BI, and third-party apps to use IoT data, with no dedicated hardware gateways or custom engineering required, Tennefoss said.

Aruba’s Wi-FI Access Points Make It Happen

Key science behind this? The converter, of course, and Aruba's Wi-Fi access points, which include both IT and IoT radios to provide secure IT mobility, connect to IoT devices, and function as embedded IoT-to-IT gateways, Tennefoss said. This is a first in the industry.

"This all means that we've cut IoT integration times from three to six months to less than 60 minutes," Tennefoss said.

Reducing data integration time from months to hours enables app developers to focus on new added-value features versus building all those interfaces for different IoT vendors, and it allows users to deploy new IoT applications more economically, Tennefoss said. It enables resellers to complete projects faster, leading to improved time-to-revenue and more projects per year, he said.

The solution is currently available for legacy and new Aruba access points with built-in IoT radios. Aruba IoT Transport for Microsoft Azure is available now as part of the Aruba Edge Services Platform, and reelyActive Pareto Anywhere for Azure is freely available open-source software downloadable from GitHub.

Microsoft Azure IoT services and Azure Marketplace applications are available today.