News

WSO2 Offers Open Source Enterprise Mobility Management

• By David Ramel
• February 22, 2017

Open source software specialist WSO2 Inc. is boosting its enterprise mobility management (EMM) capabilities with a new Internet of Things (IoT) server and device cloud.

Though the product's name bespeaks an IoT focus, the new WSO2 IoT Server is equally positioned by the company as a complete, secure EMM solution, supporting iOS, Android and Windows devices, whether owned by the company or brought in by employees.

WSO2 said it lets enterprises connect and manage mobile devices, build apps, manage events, secure devices and data, and more.

"WSO2 IoT Server lets organizations focus on adding business value while speeding time to market by providing all the features needed to start building an enterprise-grade solution -- based on IoT, mobile or both -- in one downloadable pack," the company said in a news release. "It combines proven technology from WSO2 middleware already used in production IoT and mobile deployments with new, highly extensible device management functionality."

In addition to providing self-service device enrollment and management for devices running on the aforementioned mobile platforms, WSO2 said the solution's EMM capabilities can:

• Provide policy-driven device and profile management for security, data and device features.
• Enable compliance monitoring for applied policies on devices and role-based access control.
• Provision/de-provision apps to multiple enrolled devices per user and to enrolled devices based on roles.
• Leverage multi-tenancy to ensure data isolation across all tenants.

For app development, the IoT server exposes enrolled devices as REST APIs that can be leveraged for building apps or integrating devices into existing architectures.

WSO2 IoT Server 3.0 is available now as a software download that can run directly on servers or private Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions, including Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) and VMware ESX. Another option is to have WSO2 host it through the company's Managed Cloud hosted services. The software is fully open source under the Apache License 2.0. Source code is available on GitHub.

While WSO2 IoT Server was announced about three weeks ago, the company this week announced an adjunct offering called the WSO2 Device Cloud that incorporates the IoT server functionality.

That pay-as-you-go hosted solution, now in a beta program, lets enterprises enroll devices that can be managed to ensure security and compliance policies are followed, track devices and so on.

While the brand-new beta now only offers EMM capabilities out of the box, WSO2 said future versions will:

• Expose devices as APIs to support integration and application development.
• Ensure secure device and app access through identity management and authorization.
• Simplify app management for IT teams and end-users.
• Tap insights from devices via analytics and visualizations, including analysis of data points, such as speed, proximity and geo-fencing.

The device cloud was debuted this week in conjunction with two other WSO2 public cloud services for integration and identity functionality.

The WSO2 Device Cloud can be used free of charge during the beta program until its commercial launch, targeted for the second quarter of this year.