The Thread Group and the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF – formerly the Open Interconnect Consortium), have announced an interoperability partnership that sees the two groups promise to advance the adoption of connected home products – which is good news given the slow pace of Thread certification. This is an expansion from Thread’s current reliance on ZigBee, which Thread had previously vaunted for the application layer processes that are missing from the Thread protocol. By moving towards the OCF, Thread is definitely giving itself another option for the higher layers of the OSI stack. A joint roadmap was announced in May, that should see a ZigBee-Thread test and certification program launched in Q3 of this year. The Thread Group also announced…