[November 04, 2011] Sierra Wireless and Eclipse Foundation Form Working Group Tweet Nov 04, 2011 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- Sierra Wireless and the Eclipse Foundation announced the formation of a new Industry Working Group to define and implement an open standard platform for the software development tools used in developing machine-to-machine communications applications. "M2M communications represents an exciting and challenging opportunity to positively impact the way our world operates in fields as varied as energy management, transportation, and healthcare," said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation, in a release. "We consider it critically important to provide the M2M developer community with the tools and support needed to deploy applications as efficiently as possible, and ensure that they can be easily maintained over time. Because of this, we have been developing Eclipse-based tools for many years," said Emmanuel Walckenaer, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Solutions and Services for Sierra Wireless. "This collaboration with the Eclipse Foundation and our other working group partners is an extension of our commitment to build an open M2M ecosystem, not only for the benefit of our customers, but also for the long-term development of the industry." "We believe the formation of this M2M Industry Working Group comes at a critical time. The open source contributions of M2M tools and protocols will help to reduce development time and costs, and ensure that mission critical systems maintain interoperability as deployments evolve over the lifetime of a project." "The Eclipse Machine-to-Machine Industry Working Group and the related open source projects will enable customers to integrate physical world systems into their enterprise solutions," said Angel Diaz, vice president, software standards, IBM Software Group. "Data is being captured today as never before, the Eclipse M2M initiative helps expand the spectrum of information and intelligence into the systems and processes that make the world work and become a smarter planet." IBM and Eurotech are also founding members of the M2M Industry Working Group, which is open to any organization with an interest in M2M solutions, including both vendors and potential clients. The M2M Industry Working Group is the umbrella for M2M-related Eclipse projects for open source, the first of which is the Koneki project. The goal of Koneki is to provide M2M solution developers with tools that ease the development, simulation, testing/debugging and deployment of such solutions. The M2M Industry Working Group charter is publicly available at wiki.eclipse.org/M2MIWG_charter_draft. The Koneki project is hosted by the Eclipse Foundation and can be accessed at eclipse.org/koneki/. Eurotech integrates hardware, software, and services to deliver embedded computing platforms and sub-systems. Eclipse is an open source community. Sierra Wireless offers mobile computing and machine-to-machine communications products and solutions. ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]