Qualcomm, the doyen of patent ownership has formed the AllSeen Alliance, a Linux Foundation-hosted technology, based entirely on Qualcomm’s AllJoyn language, out of the Qualcomm Innovation Center. The Alliance has attracted 23 initial members, including LG, Haier, Panasonic, and TP-Link.
Founded in 2009, the Innovation Center has allowed Qualcomm to realize that provided the ‘open’ projects are firmly under their direction, they can deliver greater returns and industry influence than closed platforms.
Despite being branded an ‘un-American cancer’ by Steve Ballmer in 2001, the open source movement has attracted $2bn investment from IBM, and is now seen as central to the future development of the Internet of Things (IoT).
AllJoyn aims to become the standard ‘glue’ to end fragmentation within the IoT, allowing billions of devices to communicate regardless of protocol or operating system. Its aim is to establish ‘a common lingua on top of the base peer-to-peer connectivity that the software enables,’ acting as the unifier. Oracle’s Java is a rival product, but Qualcomm knows AllJoyn has a better chance if it is seen as an open project. And if it succeeds, the chip giant will see a technology which it still controls becoming a key enabler in the interoperable IoT ‘ adding immeasurably to the firm’s reach and influence.
This is a huge change in the usual Qualcomm business model of licensing the technologies it develops in secretive and lucrative patent deals. It is unclear whether it is retaining patents related to AllJoyn, and whether it might charge for them, but AllJoyn has been donated in full to be hosted by the Foundation and licensed under the open source ISC license. This, of course, is essential to achieve mass uptake, and could see AllJoyn turning up in all kinds of products which Qualcomm’s silicon might not touch, allowing the company to sit spider-like at the center of a huge ecosystem web.
Like Intel, Cisco and others, Qualcomm talks in sweeping terms about IoT, but in reality knows that for commercial purposes, it needs to select a few specific targets first and build up its base step-by-step. AllJoyn’s first real IoT focus is home automation, while it is carrying out R&D in areas such as automotive, but without commercial plans until after 2014, although some AllSeen partners may extend it more rapidly to new segments.
The formation of AllSeen is just the first step in trying to leap ahead of the many other IoT standardization efforts. Some of these are coming from real standards bodies like 6LoWPAN; some from government initiatives, like the US’s Industrial Internet group, led by GE.
As Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation’s executive director said, “There have been attempts to solve this interoperability challenge the old-fashioned way. Some vendors have tried to corner the market with proprietary solutions ‘ a crippling contradiction when the basic requirement of the internet of everything is interoperability across vendors and brands. At the same time, standards setting initiatives have cropped up, but they’re inefficient when, say, every company that makes a tiny light switch needs to implement a 500-page technical spec.”
There are advantages to open initiatives, even if these are driven by vendors looking for political and commercial advantages. There will certainly be plenty of those. Oracle has a big chance to be an IoT driver thanks to its ownership of Java, while Intel and Samsung have already discussed their own frameworks for IoT middleware ‘ and Google, Sony and others will not be far behind, whether they aim for global standards, or to create a closed ecosystem around their own platforms.
Controlling that layer and its resulting ecosystem would give Oracle considerable power in the IoT space, going some way to compensating for the gradual decline of Java’s influence in handsets. In September, the database provider rolled out the latest release of Java Micro Edition Embedded, positioning it as a platform to unify diverse real time OSs and protocols, it could see other contenders for that role. Oracle is promising a Java-based services delivery platform, initially supporting a new family of gateways from Freescale, and will also run Java on microcontrollers from Freescale, Qualcomm, STMicro and others.
Whether Java, AllJoyn or something else prevails, there will be winners and losers. As with any unifying layer, there is a threat to players which make their money from building apps and hubs manually and one-by-one, and to those few which have sufficient consumer power to harmonize the interoperability of many different devices around their own proprietary framework (Apple). But if even Qualcomm is embracing open source, there seems little life left in such approaches.