The OSGi Users' Forum Germany are holding a meeting on 27 April, 2016 in Berlin at the Bosch Software Innovations training centre.

The meeting will take place between 10.00 hrs and 17.00 hrs and has a focus on OSGi and IoT.

Thanks to Bosch Software Innovations for their support by hosting the meeting.

Registration is required. Full details and the agenda are available (in German) on the event home page.

20 Complimentary Tickets Available

 Please Read On to Find out How to Request One

The OSGi Alliance is pleased to announce that we will be at CeBIT computer expo in Hannover, Germany next week from March 14 to 18. You will be able to find us in the IoT Solutions Eurotech & Partner space on stand E77 in Hall13 (see the press release).

Thanks to the support of OSGi Alliance member Eurotech and the CeBIT organizers the OSGi Alliance will be running an OSGi IoT demo and also presenting at the conference.

OSGi IoT Demo @ CeBIT

The OSGi IoT demo will be using LEGO®️ trains to show how simple it is to build, interoperate, run and change live services running in edge devices, gateways and the cloud using OSGi and OSGi enRoute. The seamless interoperation of open source projects and commercial products in the demo delivers an extensible and evolvable standards-based OSGi IoT solution.

The CeBIT demo is an extension of the 2015 Community Event demo with the inclusion of Eclipse Kura, Eurotech DynaCOR and Eurotech ReliaGATE 10-20 gateways. The demo will now allow stand visitors to interact with sensors that affect the trains' behavior.

You can find us and the demo in the IoT Solutions Eurotech & Partner space on stand E77 in Hall 13.  There will be a number of other real word OSGi based IoT solutions on show in this space too from Eurotech partners and customers. These include analytics and predictive maintenance from Hitachi High-Tech Europe, industrial PLC integration, smart energy from Misurio Ltd., managed PDU from Om7Sense, facility management/retail from FSI Ltd., people counting, and smart city/environmental monitoring.

Please be sure to stop by stand E77 to see all the OSGi demos.

Thanks to the following OSGi Alliance contributors and members for making the OSGi IoT LEGO®️ train demo happen at CeBIT:

OSGi Presentation @ CeBIT

Board member, and former president, Richard Nicholson will be representing the OSGi Alliance and presenting “Business and IoT - Economic Alchemy or Another Anticlimax ?” on Tuesday, March 15, at 1:30 p.m in Hall 13 at stand E48.  His presentation will review the fundamental characteristics required for any pervasive IoT solution to transform markets and businesses, and he will discuss the central importance of an industry standard for software modularity.

This presentation is part of the CeBIT Communication and IoT SOLUTIONS Forum.

Interested in a Complimentary Ticket to CeBIT 2016?

There is a great article published earlier this week in Jaxenter talking about the important role that OSGi has to play in IoT.  The article is by Tim Verbelen from iMinds. Tim is an invited contributor at the OSGi Alliance.

Tim discusses how the OSGi service model offers an elegant and easy way to deal with the challenges presented by the sheer volume of different devices, APIs and protocols, and the different lifecycle requirements that they all have.

The big improvements in OSGi tooling from Bndtools and OSGi enRoute are also covered.  If you haven't checked these out for yourself then they are definitely worth a look.

The article goes on to look at a Smart Home Dashboard case study that Tim has been working on with his colleagues at iMinds.

And to emphasise the concluding point - you can get involved with the OSGi IoT Expert Group to help define and deliver the specifications to further improve the IoT experience and ensure that the interfaces to all of these devices are interoperable.

The OSGi Alliance Developer Certification team are pleased to announce he first four dates for the OSGi Developer Certification - Professional exam in 2016.

We will be considering further dates and locations throughout the year depending upon demand. So if you are interested and these dates or locations don't work for you please let the Developer Certification team know your suggestions for other dates and locations.

The first exam for 2016 is being held in London, UK on Friday 11 March between 9.30am and 1.00pm.

A full list of the locations and dates that have been announced so far are as follows:


We have maintained the 2015 price for the exam at $500 per person, and the discounted student price of $200 (which requires proof if student status).

The exam is 3.5 hours in duration and consists of three sections:

• Section 1 – written questions and answers, consisting of both multiple choice and open questions.
• Section 2 – a practical assignment with working deliverables developed and submitted for assessment.
• Section 3 – a practical troubleshooting assignment. Here OSGi bundles are provided and answers should be written on the exam paper.

Details of the exam topics that may be covered along with answers to other FAQ can be found on the OSGi Alliance Developer Certification webpage.

If you have any questions please contact the Developer Certification team at the OSGi Alliance by email.

*Ludwigsburg exam date changed to 24 Oct to align with planned OSGi Community Event.

About 8 years ago Apple steamrolled the mobile telephony industry with the first iPhone. They drastically disrupted the symbiosis of operators and device manufacturers. Nokia and Motorola did not survive this mayhem and knowing the operators of 15 years ago they are still have not recovered.
After visiting the ETSI OneM2M workshop in Nice for three days I am wondering if history will repeat itself? It feels like the telecom industry never analyzed why Apple ate their lunch and thought about how to defend itself against the next attack. In the workshop the work is about standardizing protocols, abstract reference semantic reference models, and maybe some open source influence. The underlying rationale is the somewhat tired lesson that collaborating on protocols will enable interoperability, which will increase the pie many times. True, but how do we prevent that an Apple will come again and steal the pie under our nose?

Apple succeeded so easily because it hit the soft underbelly of the mobile telekom industry: software. Software was proprietary in the telekom industry, protocols were paramount. Only after NTT Docomo succeeded on generating revenues on applications did the industry enable a severely crippled software model on the phones. I did participate in an attempt of Motorola, Nokia, IBM and others to set a better software standard based on OSGi just before the iPhone hit. I can ensure you that we didn't stand a chance because the focus was on irrelevant aspects like managing the device, constraining the application developer, and lowering the cost. Instead the focus should have been on what independent developers could do with a programmable device.

The rest was history.

The iPhone enabled Facebook, WhatsApp, Google Maps, and all of the other millions of applications because anybody could write cool applications for it which is the truest source of innovation.

The telekom industry is now sitting on the fence of  a huge new market: The Internet of Things. The industry is eminently suited to provide the connectivity and having first row access to the humongous pie of IoT services. Instead of learning the lessons of the mobile telephone industry it feels like history will repeat itself.

It is the software, stupid!

Peter Kriens