Citrix Acquires Octoblu, the Drone Networking Company Formerly Known as Skynet

Dec 5th, 2014 3:14am by Alex Williams and Atul Jha

Feature image via Flickr Creative Commons.

Octoblu, a machine to machine networking platform, has been acquired by Citrx. No official news has been issued but the Octoblu web site states that the company “was acquired by Citrix in December 2014.”

It’s unclear about the terms of the deal and if it was an acquisition hire more than anything else. In any case, Chris Matthieu, one of the co-founders of the company, has changed his LinkedIn profile to the title: Director IoT Engineering at Citrix.

Octoblu, originally called Skynet, is a system for drones to talk to each other. As we have written before, it was named “after the self-aware artificial intelligence system in the Terminator movie series.”

In scope, Octoblu is designed to run on a single network or mesh of IoT networks that share a common API or communications protocol. In this scenario, devices can discover, query, and message other devices on the network.

Here is a bit more about the company, which Matthieu outlined in a talk last month at the Defrag conference that we recorded:

The API supports the following IoT protocols: HTTP, REST, WebSockets, MQTT (Message Queue Telemetry Transport), and CoAP (Constrained Application Protocol).
Skynet is open source and both a multi protocol and cross protocol platform where any device that speaks the language is be able to communicate with each other.
Every single resource on the mesh network has a UUID – a 36 character device credential that is associated with that mesh network which has its own UUID eventually making it a network of UUIDs.
The platform also needed to be able to support discovery and message ability of UUIDs to other UUIDs where it should be able to search for an array of UUIDs based on the given search criteria.

Building Skynet

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, PlayerFM, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn

Gartner Research says the Internet of Things installed base will grow to 26 Billion units by 2020. That means there will be plenty of drones filling the skies. But the infrastructure is almost non-existent.

Investment is starting to increase in drone companies. 3D Robotics, led by former Wired Editor Chris Anderson, has raised $36 million from venture capitalists over two rounds of funding.

Alex Williams is founder and publisher of The New Stack. He's a longtime technology journalist who did stints at TechCrunch, SiliconAngle and what is now known as ReadWrite. Alex has been a journalist since the late 1980s, starting at the...