Today Configured Things was founded as a startup in the configuration management space. Patrick and Simon, two of Configured Things’ co-founders are former researchers of HP Labs’ Security and Manageability Lab, they believe in the resilience and elegance of the systems that emerge from declarative definition and distributed system design, exhibiting soft-state recovery strategies that scale to the Internet.Configured Things’ vision for the way to approach the Internet of Things is through federated, decentralised control, secure configuration management and the controlled sharing of state. We specialise in the configuration management of highly dynamic systems and environments, with a specific emphasis on use cases such as physical and virtualised control rooms, multi-use digital spaces (e.g. stadia), shared meeeting spaces, situational awareness for disaster or event management, and more generally the control of complex collections of devices, services and other “things” of which the previous contexts are examples.
Each of the specified focus areas have something in common – they are a dynamic combination of services, spaces and devices within which humans exist and with which they need to interact or, in the case of advertising, can be interacted with. In each case, information will be gathered, analysed, shared and displayed. The display environment could be in a physical control room with individual and shared display areas, hundreds of thousands of fans at a sports venue to be sensed and engaged by individualised content on digital signage, or it could be virtualised and include disparate individuals seated in their own offices or in the field with portable devices such as tablets and phones.
As situations change, games are played or as meetings progress, new services may need to be enabled, commercials to be recalculated and content updated and new people need to share and interact with the data. This requires a strong automation and configuration capability that includes data and its visualisation as much as the services which produce them.
Sharing of raw and derived information is key and this has important security and privacy implications. Systems need to adapt to who is within the space and can access the data, in what context, they could be in a secure room or could be out in the field, and also the type of the device and whether it can be trusted (for example whether it is encrypted). These get far more complex in a virtualised cyber-space than in a single fixed secure room.
Our technologies will provide key capabilities required in verticals seeking to grow business through increased automation and real-time visibility. They are all centred around the notion of configuration management, of providing declarative models that are realised to achieve the ends required. The systems produced will provide a high degree of security and thus confidence in the properties of the system created and its security overall.
About Configured Things
Configured Things provides a resilient configuration management platform and consultancy for federated problem spaces such as the Internet of Things and Smart Cities. Configured Things technologies provide key capabilities required for organisations seeking to grow business through increased automation and real-time visibility, it’s approach centres around the configuration management of Things via declarative system models. With a high degree of confidence in the properties of the system created and thus its security, organisations are more likely to achieve the Digital Transformation they seek to achieve.
