This week, the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) announced several new members, including big names IBM, Inside Secure and National Instruments, as well as a few lesser-known additions to the group from around the globe – including Taiwanese silicon vendors TA-I, Kookmin University in South Korea and South African engineering company Micosa.
The OIC, launched by Intel, Samsung and Broadcom, is constructing an open source framework to wirelessly connect technologies and regulate the stream of information between the billions of devices comprising the IoT. The framework is called IoTivity, but we had anticipated it being released by now. Direct rival AllJoyn has already made it to market, but from the outside, it looks like the OIC is lagging behind the Qualcomm initiative.
The latest OIC specification (version 0.9.1) has now been released. This spec has passed IP review by all member companies and approval from the board, but the wait for version 1.0 continues.
This announcement comes shortly after the OIC publicized 25 new international additions in May, bringing the total number of (public) member organizations up to 92 compared to the AllSeen Alliance’s 180+ members. Interestingly, we found that the two groups now have 11 overlapping members, most notably ADT and Honeywell.
Something that soon became apparent was that the familiar name of Cisco was missing from the official list of member organizations on the AllSeen Alliance website. We contacted Cisco for clarification, but they claimed ignorance to its exclusion from the list, and denied that they had left the AllSeen Alliance, as the website might indicate – as founding member Broadcom did, due to a disagreement on the IP ramifications of the OIC’s licensing agreements.
Cisco is perhaps preoccupied with being director and founding member of The Wireless IoT Forum, at least the fifth IoT standards body to be formed within the last 18 months and Cisco’s second, along with Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC). The Wireless IoT Forum is working on accelerating adoption of wireless WAN technologies dedicated to the IoT market, with Accenture, Arkessa, BT Telensa and WSN amongst its influencers.
This is fast becoming a ‘Game of IoT Standards’, with the absence of allegiance to one standard body being just one of the obstacles standing in the way of mass implementation in the UK, US and Europe.