Google’s Brillo Proves IoT Integration is Closer Than You Think

If you belong to the camp that thinks the Internet of Things is some far-off unlikely-to-happen technological revolution, think again. At Google’s I/O developer’s conference, which concluded on May 29, the technology giant announced Project Brillo, the first ever standardized operating system for the IoT. According to Google, they are readying Brillo to be the underlying system for the IoT.

Brillo is a descendant of Android, a more “polished” and toned-down version, according to the company. The platform will support Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Low Energy, and other Android-enabled technologies. In addition to Brillo, Google also unveiled ‘Weave’, a common language that internet-connected IoT devices will use to talk to one another. Weave will be supported on all Brillo devices, which include smartphones, smart appliances, and more.

What’s important is that Brillo will enable devices that run on low power to talk to each other, something that is essential for the IoT to really take off beyond smartphones, computers, and consumer electronic devices. Brillo can be controlled directly from a centrally-managed console and provides consumers with broad-based support for easy-to-manage security.

All of this is great, but of even greater importance is the standardization possibilities that Brillo represents. Research and development for the IoT has been all over the place, so this is a big step, especially if you’re Google or one of their partners, in the universal deployment of IoT in the coming months and years. This will allow developers working across countless devices and platforms to join together and hang their hats in the same space.

Consumer IoT will be impacted first, and will include products like wearables, smartphones, and connected home devices. Later on it is assumed that the IIoT will adopt either Brillo or whatever Brillo evolves into. The IIoT, in case you didn’t know, stands for the Industrial Internet of Things, a topic which we covered extensively here.

Last year, Google purchased Nest, a home automation company that designs and manufactures programmable smart thermostats and smoke detectors. The acquisition was obviously a sign of things to come for Google, and now we know just what that something is. Conceivably, Google’s Brillo could be used to control those kinds of devices, and the likelihood is that Google will integrate those two together as its first test for Brillo is an IoT platform.

We’ll be sure to cover the upcoming developer previews for Brillo (Q3 2015) and Weave (Q4 2015) as they become available.

Stay tuned into Solutions Review for all of your IoT news as it happens.