Sierra Wireless: first Developer Day

With two friends of mine, I co-founded in 1990 a (very) small company. We were designing and developing what is named today M2M systems. Just twenty years ago, we delivered to the taxis of the city of Cannes what was the most reliable, and least costly taxi dispatch system available on the market at this time. Thanks to our complementary skills and experiences (embedded hardware and software, private mobile radio networks, communication protocols, application software...), we had designed an highly optimized system, in record time.

Ten years later, I was investigating the market, trying to find THE right solution to migrate some of our systems to GPRS. And I discovered two really exciting products: the first one was a programmable terminal with a touch screen, and an SDK designed exactly for our type of systems. This was a product from a french company named Mobile Devices. They still exist, and they still market a fascinating line of products, for who wants to develop "telematics" systems. But at this time, their device was too expensive for our customers (today, that's totally different! I'll write more about them in another article soon).

The second product I discovered was the Fastrack programmable "modem", associated to an SDK named OpenAT. Wavecom, another french company, was the manufacturer. I ordered one development kit, followed the training in Paris, and started to play with it. Rapidly, I was captivated: OpenAT was providing all functions I was looking for. And the modem was fulfilling most of my requirements: reliable hardware, IP stack for GPRS, data storage, OTA update, "low" cost, etc. But it happened that one year later, we decided to close down our business, for several reasons (I'll explain this later in another article...)

In my new position in the company I joined, I brought in the idea of using OpenAT and associated hardware for some projects. For one of these projects, I ported to OpenAT a small software library that I had developed in my previous company, allowing for asynchronous downlink communication. The most common word use to describe this type of capability today is push.

Some time later, I discovered a software solution from Anyware Technologies (still a french company!) allowing for rapid development of M2M systems integrating OpenAT devices.

In the beginning of 2008, Wavecom bought Anyware Technologies. And about one year later, Sierra Wireless (a canadian company, this time...) bought Wavecom.

While not using anymore OpenAT those past years, I had kept on eye on Wavecom and Sierra Wireless products and services (good products can't be easily forgotten ), and had noticed that OpenAT was still alive, and well alive, and that the software solution from Anyware Technologies had evolved a lot. When I was informed of Sierra's first developer day, I decided to join. So, I was there, on Friday, June 14^th.

What could I say about this day? Well, firstly, I really enjoyed one of their recurrent messages: to make M2M complexity... simple. Secondly, in order to support this message, they deliver a line of products and services that seem to allow very rapid design and rollout of M2M systems, addressing most of associated requirements: programmable devices in various form factors (modules, modems, gateways), associated SDKs, optimized data protocols, application builder, device management, data storage and retrieval as a service, etc. Thirdly, and, according to me, that's perhaps the most important point: openness. Part of their software offering was moved to open source. Consequently, a customer is not locked to their offering. It's not because you use an OpenAT device that you have to store your data on their AirVantage platform. And, the other way round, if you use a specific device that you would like to connect to AirVantage, you can do so, porting related open source code on to your device.

Another point: I remember that when I started developing for OpenAT, getting some support was not so easy (I'm lucky enough to have quite a long experience in embedded development, that allows me to solve most of problems I face. But, sometimes, you can't escape calling support people...) But nowadays, Sierra Wireless runs a developer zone, where you can get lot of support. And actually, on Friday, several developers said that no matter the size of your company, you always get support from Sierra...

All materials presented during the developers day is now available in the Developer Zone. So, I won't write anymore about this day for now. Excepted that I'll try to find an opportunity to start over developing with OpenAT  and to test AirVantage.