The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) has added 27 new companies to its ranks and announced its board of directors. The OIC says the new members will help it develop an overarching interoperability standard for the IoT, and it provides a potential leverage for the companies that now sit on its board – Samsung, Intel, Mediatek and Cisco.
But the most interesting part of the press release and our subsequent visit to the OIC website was our surprise to find that founding-member Broadcom’s name had been removed from the list – with absolutely no explanation or reference to the event.
We are still waiting for comment from both Broadcom and the OIC, but big companies are not in the habit of upping sticks and leaving alliances they help establish – especially when they can afford the fees as Broadcom certainly can. Without access to the inner-circles, we can only speculate as to why the silicon giant has left the table – but the likely culprits would be IP disputes, FRAND licensing terms, and possibly disagreements on the direction the group was taking.
So from the outside it seems that all is not entirely well, especially if we infer from the lack of response that both parties are taking a “no comment” approach to the matter. We’ll have to wait and see how this pans out, but it’s very much worth drawing your attention to in the meantime.
But back to the new members. The OIC was founded by Atmel (Platinum member), Broadcom, Dell (Platinum), Intel (Diamond – the highest tier) and its subsidiary Wind River (Gold) and Samsung (Diamond).
The new members are Acer (Gold), ActnerLab (Gold), Allion (Gold), Aepona (Gold), Cisco (Diamond), Cryptosoft (Gold), Eyeball Networks (Platinum), Global Channel Resources (Gold), Gluu (Gluu), IIOT Foundation Japan (Gold), InFocus (Gold), Laplink Software (Gold), Mashery (Gold), McAfee (Gold), MediaTek (Platinum), Metago (Gold), New Aer (Gold), Nitero (Gold), OSS Nokalva (Gold), Realtek (Gold), Remo Software (Gold), Roost (Gold), Samsung Electro-Mechanics (Diamond), SmartThings (Gold), Thug Design (Gold), VMC Consulting (Gold) and Zula (Gold).
The new board of directors is as follows: Jon-Deok Choi, executive vice president and deputy head of software R&D at Samsung Electronics, is the OIC President; Imad Sousou, VP software and services group and general manager for Intel’s Open Source Tech Center, is the new OIC Vice President; Bernard Shrung, GM for new business development at Mediatek, is the new OIC secretary; and Kip Compton, VP IoT systems and software group at Cisco, is the OIC Treasurer.
The party line from the new president is “we are following a proven path of innovation with the OIC, by encouraging industry-wide collaboration, and our board members represent our commitment to provide a standard across a broad range of market sectors facing challenges from emerging IoT technology trends. Our leadership and growing membership will create a single standard to solve connectivity and interoperability challenges in order to support the billions of connected devices coming online.”