SMA is a leading global specialist in photovoltaic system technology with more than 3,000 SMA employees in 20 countries.
In 2015 SMA decided to develop the ennexOS platform - a cross-sector platform for holistic, intelligent energy management. An important part of this platform is the data-manager - an IoT gateway that acquires information from various energy generators, storages and loads and performs commissioning and management tasks.
This new generation of data-managers demanded for new approaches in software-architecture to:
- run on a broad range of hardware platforms, and
- be extendible e.g. to support different protocols for easy integration, and
- to enable a broad range of applications in the energy-management field that may be customized by apps installed during runtime
After an exhaustive investigation on existing solutions, OSGi was chosen as the key technology for this new generation of devices - a quite challenging decision, because at this point there was only limited experience in Java and OSGi development in the company.
This talk will present the key factors that lead to this decision, how we very carefully build up Java and OSGi knowledge, and started with an initial design. OSGi enRoute and the support of OSGi experts helped us to accelerate our development and become familiar with OSGi - although we also had times when we were struggling because of the new technology.
The talk will demonstrate what we have reached until now and we will tell you if OSGi has kept it's promise ...