Wia is a cloud platform that aims to provide developers with a scalable and powerful backend for their Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. According to Conall Laverty, founder and CEO at Wia, that will enable the creation of fully fledged, production ready solutions without worrying about server management, data replication, and storage. InfoQ has spoken with Laverty.
The main features that the Wia platform provides are:
- Device management, including device creation, retrieval, deletion, etc.
- Events and logs handling, including publishing an event/log and subscribing/unsibscribing to/from events/logs.
- Analytics, which make it possible to track any data point in real time.
- Push notifications.
Wia also provides users and organisations management, and authentication. All of Wia’s features are either available through a REST API or a web-based dashboard. Events and logs can also be streamed using the MQTT protocol, which is a light weight messaging protocol on top of TCP/IP that privileges a “small code footprint” and is specially targeted for use with limited bandwidth networks. Officially supported open source libraries for Node.js and iOS are available that aim to make it easier to access Wia’s REST API.
Wia cloud platform has to face the competition of major cloud providers such Amazon Web Services, whose AWS IoT product has recently become available, and IBM, with their IBM IoT Foundation Platform. InfoQ has spoken with Conall Laverty to learn more about their offering.
What kind of problems does Wia aim to solve for developers of IoT solutions? What are the most relevant features for an IoT-specific cloud platform to provide?
Wia aims to solve the complexity and cost behind developing a real-time Internet of Things platform. We believe always on, two-way communication is vital which is why we have built our platform around MQTT. This protocol provides us with a way to not just send sensor data but control actuators as well.
How does Wia compare to competitor services such as AWS IoT and IBM IoT Foundation Platform?
Wia provides the full-stack, out-of-the-box. Unlike our competitors, we provide developers with all the software needed for their device applications, the cloud endpoint to connect to and the libraries needed to build their own dashboard and mobile app experiences.
What is your perception of the way that the IoT is evolving? Which technologies are key for the IoT next future?
IoT is pretty horizontal at the moment. We believe it will become more exciting when it is brought back down to its verticals and the key issues in each of those are addressed. Bluetooth 4.2 looks really exciting. TCP/IP and mesh together is a pretty great mix for creating low-cost, wide area sensor networks.
Wia provides a free-tier for an umlimited number of devices and up to 250,000 requests per month.
