[Info-vax] VMS and the Internet of Things (IoT)

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2016-09-11 10:16:52 +0000, Simon Clubley said:

> So that's my take on the IoT. What's yours and where do you see a 
> possible place for VMS within the IoT world ?

OpenVMS is ill-suited as an embedded operating system or as an 
intermediate controller or aggregator.   It's been priced out of those 
markets for decades.    That's also without discussing 
currently-missing or currently-weak features and hardware support and 
power management that would be desirable or required in those markets, 
and (the lack of) which will preclude OpenVMS in those deployments.

The only way VSI plays at the lower-end tiers is with some new product 
or some new variant of VAX ELN.   Not with OpenVMS.  Cheaper, 
higher-volume, purpose-built, etc...   Then integrate OpenVMS with that 
client.  Then some savvy marketing.

I expect to see some OpenVMS boxes acting as mid-range network servers 
and some of those will get updated to receive notifications and data 
from embedded sensors and aggregation; what can be called sensor or 
probes or PLCs in some environments.   Those markets and those 
capabilities have been around for decades with OpenVMS, and — ignoring 
DTLS, authentication and other security requirements that can arise in 
newer deployments — are nothing particularly new.    But I expect there 
will be few IoT- or industrial-control-related new server deployments 
outside of the installed base.

The way VSI plays here — for new customers and wholly new deployments, 
looking for mid-range servers — is with all of the work on "the 
whiteboard", and probably some other bits specific to industrial 
control and distributed networking, as well as the requisite 
development and deployment tools and support, and with the requisite 
savvy marketing.



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