Executive Interview: Jonas Jacobi, CEO and Co-Founder at Kaazing

Kaazing is web communications experts for the Internet of Things (IoT), leverages the Web in a way that accelerates, scales and secures what innovative companies want to get done online by implementing a KAAZING Gateway to extend what they are already doing. By adding to their gateway, online businesses are empowered to start taking advantage of all the facets of an event-driven architecture via full duplex, bi-directional messaging that is protocol agnostic. Droid Report recently interviewed Jonas Jacobi about his current role at Kaazing and IoT insights.

Jonas Jacobi

Droid Report: Hello Jonas, Kaazing recently spoke at AppsWorld in San Francisco. Could you tell us more about your current role and your initiatives for 2014?

Jonas Jacobi: Hi, Apps World is a key event for us as it reaches the developer community we are most engaged with - the application developer. Developers are increasingly faced with new challenges as the proliferation of smart phones, tablets, and a myriad of new exciting Web-enabled devices are hitting the market, such as connected wearables, cars and healthcare, smart homes and even smart cities. Kaazing plays a critical role in the development and expansion of this emerging market - the Internet of Things, or as we like to call it an Internet of many different things. This year we are expanding our presence with a focused effort to educate the industry about the impact of IoT, and how we can help accelerating the Web for this new era in Internet computing.

Droid Report: Could you share some insight about the rising need of enterprise customers and developers in which organizations are pressured to fulfill, and globally scale new IoT applications and services?

Jonas Jacobi: The definition of IoT is not new, in fact its been around for over a decade. What has changed is the public's awareness that the technology we use on a daily basis has caught up on the vision of an always on, always connected World. With awareness comes demand, and with demand comes requirements to deliver on that demand. Right now we are asking, and demanding, that our personal information will be shared at lightning speed on any type of device, we are increasing looking to collect information about our surroundings such as my overall health, how far I have walked, where my car has been, etc... and we want it all to be connected. With more sensors being deployed globally and delivering an increasing amount of data, in combination of our desire and need to react on this data in a timely manner, the burden on enterprises existing software and hardware infrastructure is taxed to the brink of collapse.

Droid Report: Kaazing’s benefits include: the extension of any TCP-based backend system directly to Web browsers and mobile devices; low cost, simple, fast development and easy integration with event-driven architectures. Which benefit features do you see standing out the most for your customers?

Jonas Jacobi: I could probably list a whole page of features :) but to keep it short I would say our ability to provide reliable and guaranteed data delivery to any Web-enabled end-point, and Enterprise Shield(TM) feature. Another powerful feature is our ability to fan-out data as late as possible in an Edge-style deployment, which greatly off-loads the center of the architecture and thus TCO for our customers.

Droid Report: Banking apps are viewed today as being the most at risk for malware threats, with the largest majority of attacks coming from Android-based smartphones. What are your thoughts on security and threats in this area?

Jonas Jacobi: Security is a critical aspect in connecting all kinds of devices over the Web, and is a major concern for our enterprise customers in a variety of industries, and as such we take security extremely serious since our clients are running mission critical solutions on our IoT platform leveraging our Enterprise Shield functionality. That said, users of any popular platform will always be targeted by malicious elements attempting to compromise the device with malware, however, there are plenty of solutions available to keep your Android devices safe. Not to mention that Android is probably one of the most secure mobile platforms out there today claiming that only 0.001% of downloaded applications are able to evade the built-in security and harm the user.

Droid Report: Is there anything else you feel Android users and the Android market should know?

Jonas Jacobi: Our 4.0 release has full support for native Android and with it you can build some awesome applications. Just check out our online demos at kaazing.com

Kaazing is helping define the future of the event-driven enterprise by accelerating the Web for the Internet of Things. The company’s IoT gateway – a software-based WebComms (web communications) platform – enables mobile users, marketplaces and machines to connect and communicate in real-time, more reliably and at unprecedented scale. Kaazing customers include one of the world’s largest energy-producing and trading companies, three of the world’s top ten banks, one of America’s top three professional sports franchises, one of Europe’s most sophisticated rail transportation networks, one of the top three transportation companies in the USA, one of the world’s top five commercial airlines, one of the world’s best known cable and satellite networks, and one of the world’s most valuable retail brands. Kaazing’s founders pioneered and championed the groundbreaking HTML5 WebSocket standard and drive Kaazing’s platform software innovations from defining the architecture of the Kaazing product suite to overseeing its development and subsequent implementation in enterprises.

We would like to thank Jonas Jacobi for taking the time for this discussion and Kaazing.