PubNub Aims to Extend Its Reach in Terms of Developers, Capabilities

PubNub, which provides the developer community with infrastructure that makes it easy and fast to connect any device with any other device or application, is working to expand its profile with developers outside the IoT space. It also plans to add compute capabilities to its existing streaming and storage functionality, so it has the IoT intelligent edge networking trifecta.

Doron Sherman, vice president of business development at the San Francisco-based company, shared this information with IoT Evolution World yesterday in Las Vegas.

The company runs what it calls the Data Stream Network and outfits developers with an easy-to-use API that enables them to connect, scale and manage real-time applications and IoT devices. Five-and-a-half-year-old PubNub runs a complex network to enable that, but developers don’t have to deal with that complexity, Sherman said, because PubNub gives them SDKs that are open source and plug into any programming language.

“It basically gives you a dialtone to the Internet,” he said.

For those, like me, with a telecom background, Sherman said PubNub offers for IoT developers what RCS tried to do for telcos.

Speaking of telcos, Sherman talked about the potential for PubNub to work with a tier 1 cellular company, which could support PubNub’s capability on its SIM to elevate its value proposition. But this part of the discussion was very forward-looking and not central to what the company is focused on now.

Right now, PubNub is working to extend its influence with developers, of which it touches 100,000 today, by working with ecosystem partners. Atmel and TI were already among its ecosystem partners, and PubNub just added Microchip Technology to the list, announcing support for the company’s portfolio of 32-bit PIC microcontrollers.

Sherman plans to go from IoT Expo Evolution in Las Vegas this week straight to Microchip’s Worldwide MASTERs Conference in Phoenix, where he will be involved in providing instruction on how to build a real-time IoT application using MPLAB Harmony and a PubNub PIC32 SDK.

Among PubNub’s next moves will be fleshing out its capabilities to enable intelligent decisions related to connected devices and networks. Sherman notes that many IoT use cases today focus on collecting sensor data, but he said IoT also can be leveraged to enable device control as well. Organizations, he said, can use the data they collect from sensors—and potentially other data—to make intelligent decisions about how devices should behave. (Kind of like what Cisco refers to as fog computing, but Cisco is not currently a PubNub partner.)

This model, Sherman said, will require streaming and storage, two capabilities PubNub already has. It will also require compute capabilities, he added, which is what’s next.