BlackBerry Enters The Internet Of Things With ‘Project Ion’

BlackBerry is launching a series of projects called Project Ion for the internet of things with the idea of using its experience in building secure, connected devices to connect sensors, cars and anything else in a secure fashion to a cloud back end. Alec Saunders, the vice president of cloud at BlackBerry, launched the project at the O’Reilly Solid conference in San Francisco with a call for developers to try to build applications on the proposed platform.

What is Project Ion?

The project is a cloud back end and BlackBerry’s QNX software that allows a device to send information back to the cloud. When it comes to the cloud portion, Saunders said in an interview before his talk, “We have stolen liberally from open source software in computing and networking that has been going on in the last couple of years. Many of them didn’t exist in the form we are using them in, 18 months ago.”

The database is Cassandra, chosen because it handles data writes (as opposed to reads) better, and BlackBerry assumes that all the data from devices coming in will be massive and possibly in different formats that will eventually need to be consolidated into one single format. The cloud uses Kafka for getting data in and out of the Cassandra cluster, Solr for search and Vert.x for programming. The cloud back end is being hosted with an undisclosed provider, chosen because Saunders noted, “We are building this very fast.” My hunch is a public cloud provider, although Saunders said the current host might change because depending on how each provider structures their offers and the eventual architecture of the cloud, it might cost less to host elsewhere.

The software side will rely on QNX where it already exists, such as in cars, but BlackBerry will also provide documentation or maybe even open source parts of QNX to allow programmers to write code for devices that can talk back to the QNX cloud. Programmers can use JSON, C languages, Node and other popular tools. Read more on this story at Giga OM.