Why Shepherd?
This new infrastructure will provide functions common to many
applications, thereby reducing complexity, development effort and
maintenance costs for these applications. There will also be
significant operating cost savings, because the costs for such a
managed service infrastructure will be shared across many
independent applications.
However, the largest innovation potential lies in allowing
sensor information to be shared in a safe manner across any
application and allowing any device to connect to any application -
which means that new applications can be created on the basis of
installed devices, and new devices can easily be connected to
existing applications.
The value of such object networks increase exponentially with
the number of nodes. This may result in hyper growth when a
critical mass is reached. We have already observed this with the
Internet.
Key functions
We have identified the following key Object Service Enablement
Functions:
• Managed connectivity
• Device and gateway interfacing
• Data capture, handling and storage
• Information exchange and routing
• Alarm handling
• Device management
• Service management
• Solution monitoring/reporting
• Object access brokerage
• Interconnection with other OSEFs
• Interfacing to business systems
The Shepherd® platform is an open and future proof architecture
which allows customers to freely choose the most suitable
combination of devices and applications. The platform is designed
to telecom principles of scalability, reliability and security.