IoT can be hard, but Red Hat and Eurotech are teaming up to make it easier

Italy-based Eurotech offers machine-to-machine platforms and other IoT products. Red Hat plans to combine its open-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat JBoss middleware with Eurotech's Everyware Software Framework and Eurotech Everyware Cloud to create an end-to-end architecture for IoT. This will let enterprises integrate operational data from computing equipment at the edge of the network with cloud-based back-end services.

Enterprise IoT needs computing capability at the edges of networks so companies don't have to ship masses of data to the cloud for real-time processing. Instead, data aggregation and transformation, plus data integration and routing, can take place close to the operational devices.

Promising better security, manageability and application support for IoT systems, the two companies will offer data, device and embedded application management services.

"This is a logical move in the IoT as both these firms have strong open-source software strategies," said Alfonso Velosa III, a research vice president with Gartner.

Those strategies also are generally complementary, Velosa said, so "this has the potential to help drive IoT solutions and some integration facilitation in the market."

However, for the foreseeable future, most IoT projects will be heavily customized, so vertical industry expertise will remain more critical than horizontal solutions, he said.

"Red Hat and Eurotech will need to pick vertical markets and start to roll out solutions for them to make this as competitive as possible," he said. "They will also need to ensure that the developer experience is as robust and easy to use as possible to encourage developers at system integrators, OEMs and other enterprises to use it."