Do you remember the Wild West land grab days of enterprise IT? When systems couldn’t communicate because they were completely, irredeemably and amazingly incompatible?

This problem was fixed by one Dr Rafael Bracho, who just happens to be a SPARKL shareholder. In 1997, he designed the message broker, or what we now call the Enterprise Service Bus.

Squawk

Actually, you should also know that Rafael has a parrot, and wears truly startling parrot earrings.

Perhaps more importantly, he created the message broker as a way to implement communications between mutually interacting software applications. Essentially, he helped them to talk properly - though not so loudly as his parrot.

History repeats itself

Of course, today you can buy internet-connected things from all sorts of suppliers. But if you buy them you discover, too late, that they don’t really talk to each other - except through some cloud provider or other that you likely wouldn’t trust with a lump of bubblegum.

So now, we’ve got the whole thing over again. Those things on the internet don’t work together like they should.

And who’s going to break the ice? Are slow, expensively curated marketing partnerships and central cloud services the way forward?

Automation means scalability

No, that approach just doesn’t scale. The IoT is an internet of billions of things. They’re all at the same party. So they have to work together naturally, and automatically.

We reckon the only real answer to this is automatic sequencing. It’s obvious, really. When we talk about things working together, we are talking about the meaningful sequence of events that flows between them to achieve some intent.

SPARKL provides the abstraction and engine that makes this happen automatically - for real.

Photo courtesy of commons.wikimedia.org.