OSGi Benefits

Generic OSGi Benefits

The OSGi Alliance provides a comprehensive summary of some of the generic benefits of using the OSGi technology. The following sections translate those into propositions for specific market entities and participants.

OSGi Benefits for embedded Devices

• Time-to-Market: OSGi makes devices “soft”. New features, services & APIs can be deployed at any time even after completion of the device design process. Device owners can respond to changing market trends instantly.
  
• Extended hardware lifetime: OSGi separates the lifecycle of hardware and software. It extends the harware lifetime by the ability to ship new software features at any time.
• Reduced cost of ownership: OSGi enables to host N services on one device, thus supports the notion of multi-purpose devices.
  
• Open for 3rd party Innovation: OSGi offers a robust policy concept that the device owner can leverage to open the device for third parties.
• Customer Care: OSGi can be applied to reduce the number of care calls and call times while increasing the support quality by leveraging real-time device data.

OSGi Benefits for Developers

• Code re-use: OSGi forces modularity into designs which increases the re-use opportunity for modules.
• Portability: OSGi is available on essentially all platforms, thus porting modules is significantly cheaper.
• Knowhow: Using the same Java and web technologies on embedded devices turns server developers into embedded developers without additional learning required.
• Efficiency: There is a growing pool of ready to use OSGi based components available on the market that help you boot your implementation efficiency.

OSGi Benefits for Fixed-Mobile Convergence

• Cross-device platform: OSGi is an open cross-platform services framework available on Connected Home devices, Phones, MIDs, NIDs.
• Web Technologies: OSGi can be tightly integrated with rich internet application (RIA) web & widget technologies and thus allows you to leverage a web browser as a consumer service front-end.
  
• Integration: OSGi in an integration point for other standards like HGI, Broadband Forum, Zigbee, Zwave, DLNA, etc.