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 become 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.
The OIC’s main rival, the AllSeen Alliance, held out the possibility of converging their efforts as it announced its own new premier member, Philips. The Alliance, which backs an open source release of Qualcomm’s AllJoyn device discovery and connectivity technology as a de facto standard, has received a major boost from the Windows 10 launch, since every W10 device will have the software installed by default. That will greatly increase the 10m figure currently claimed for AllJoyn installations.
Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT for the Alliance, told FierceWirelessTech: “I hope Microsoft is wildly successful and we’re in 50m or 60m devices by the end of the week.” The body now has over 170 members.
He believes that the large number of IoT-related would-be standards groups will start to cooperate rather than compete, in order to guard against damaging fragmentation. For instance, the ULE (Ultra-Low Energy) Alliance is looking at ways to incorporate AllJoyn in its home control network technology; and AllJoyn itself claims to be “super compatible” with both ZigBee and Thread, two 802.15.4 connectivity protocols which many expect to converge.
However, running AllJoyn in the application layer above a range of transports, such as Thread, is just sensible, while working with a direct alternative like OIC will be more problematic. Nevertheless, in the Fierce interview, DesAutels did not rule out the option, since both are purg the same goal of open connectivity. “If you look at the technology, they’re not all that different,” he said. It’s really history that separates the groups more than anything else. It’s my strongest hope that these two projects can really come together and figure out how to really accelerate the market. This is a case of one plus one equals three.”