The Open Connectivity Foundation and AllSeen Alliance have announced that the two organizations will combine efforts to accelerate Internet of Things (IoT) interoperability.
The two organizations said that this merger will advance interoperability between connected devices from both groups, enabling the full operating potential of IoT and representing a significant step towards a connected ecosystem. The merged group will operate under the OCF name and its bylaws.
It said the merger will see AllSeen Alliance bring its global membership, AllJoyn technology, and millions of AllJoyn-enabled products into the market through the AllJoyn Certified program. OCF brings its membership, formal IoT standards with expertise across multiple vertical markets and cloud-native architecture as implemented within the IoTivity framework. It said that the combination will create an organisation that establishes the broad interoperability needed to realise the full market potential for IoT.
The combined organisation will work on future OCF specifications, as well as the IoTivity and AllJoyn open source projects. The expanded OCF board of directors will consist of executives from a wide array of leading companies: AB Electrolux, Arçelik A.S., ARRIS International plc, CableLabs, Canon, Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., GE Digital, Haier.
In addition, OCF will now sponsor both the IoTivity and AllJoyn open source projects at The Linux Foundation. Both projects will collaborate to support future versions of the OCF specification in a single IoTivity implementation. Current devices running on either AllJoyn or IoTivity solutions will be interoperable and backward-compatible. Companies already developing IoT solutions based on either technology can proceed with the confidence that their products will be compatible with the unified IoT standard that the industry has been asking for.
Related: Interoperability is the lifeblood of the IoT
Open Connectivity Foundation can ‘make IoT a more seamless’ experience
“By coming together as one group, we are able to make IoT a more seamless, secure experience for everyone involved, from developers to end users,” said Danny Lousberg, chairperson of the AllSeen Alliance.
“The AllSeen Alliance and Open Connectivity Foundation have been working together closely to deliver a technologically comprehensive solution that makes sense for the industry and our members.
“We’re incredibly excited about this unification as both groups have been working diligently to make this possible,” said Mike Richmond, executive director, Open Connectivity Foundation. “As we forge onwards towards this shared goal, we are focused on building the most robust, open IoT software solution to achieve our vision – complete interoperability within the IoT.”
Russell Doty, technology strategist and product manager at open source software provider, Red Hat told Internet of Business that one of the challenges for any new field is balancing standardisation with innovation. This can be especially true for domains such as IoT that involve distributed systems built with components from multiple vendors.
“Similar to mobile, IoT has the potential to reshape enterprise IT, but with so many players in the ecosystem, open standards and interoperability are needed to make it work. In networking, for example, TCP/IP beat out other competing protocols because it was chosen as the industry standard. We anticipate IoT will follow a similar path. Once a standard has been agreed upon and implemented, we anticipate that organisations will invest in advanced mobilisation of a broader set of assets and back-end data sets. Open, interoperable mobile application platforms are expected to play an important role in enabling this mobilisation,” he said.