PLAT.ONE was an exhibitor, speaker, and sponsor for the Fog Computing Conference in San Jose last week, where CEO Filippo Murroni explained the relevance of fog to the Internet of Things and what his company is doing on this front.
Murroni said that PLAT.ONE – which sells a complete, enterprise-grade IoT platform with open interfaces, reliability, and security – has been working with Cisco Systems in recent months on an IoT reference architecture. Fog is level three of that architecture.
The role of fog computing, Murroni noted, is bringing data closer to the user or the machine; creating dense geographical distribution; supporting mobility and IoT; helping with security and privacy issues; and seamlessly integrating with cloud services. In short, he said, fog lets you react on the edge, ensure low latency, and process events as they happen.
He also talked about a couple of fog use cases involving the PLAT.ONE platform. The first one he mentioned involves a telecom operator for which PLAT.ONE installed fog components to aggregate data coming from devices. The benefit to the operator is the delivery of predigested, preprocessed data about its resources. WI-NEXT, also a sponsor of the Fog Computing Conference, provides low-power Wi-Fi for the deployment.
The second use case involves parking meters, which Murroni noted are everywhere and are very rich appliances with printers inside and HMI. Embedding components of fog within a parking meter, he said, enables cities to use the parking meter as a hub at which to collect information from surrounding things like light fixtures.
The inaugural Fog Computing Conference also included, Cisco Systems, the Diamond sponsor of the event, and Opengear – the conference sponsor.