Confused about the Internet of Things? Join the club

Over the past year or so there has been a mounting flood of tweets, news reports, white papers, and

announcements related to the “Internet of Things”.  This is you know, where you roll out of bed, grab your smart device, and tell it to get the toaster ready.  As you’re getting dressed, you receive a text message telling you your toast is ready and browned to perfection.  Later while at the office your stapler messages you that it needs a refill.  Sarcasm intended, but the possibilities are endless and only limited by our imagination when one thinks of the universe of interconnected devices. You see, one day there will be RFID chips and IP addresses attached to just about everything we use. 

But first, in order for these devices to truly be interoperable, they need to be able to communicate with each other via some sort of common protocol, a standard.  Before this can happen, there has to be a generally accepted set of rules governing whatever that standard purports to define.  Ideally, this acceptance should be industry wide and adopted by partner firms and their competitors.  These standards are set by standards bodies comprised of member companies whose employees volunteer their time and expertise.

In the course of my career, I’ve had varying degrees of experience with a couple of different standards groups:  ANSI X12, which defines one of the standards for Electronic Data Interchange in a variety of industries, and papinet which is a global standard for supply chain messaging within the pulp and paper vertical markets – from raw timber harvesting to the printing of end point magazines and newspapers.  Work on a standards body often requires a great deal of time as well as a significant financial commitment for travel and related expenses.  During my tenure working with the papinet team, we held working group meetings in Washington DC, Oslo, Seattle, Vienna, Chicago, and Helsinki, and all that was in about a six-month period.

Standards bodies are governed by an executive steering committees comprised of various companies with interest in the standard (which often compete directly against one another) and contain various ‘Working groups’.  It is within these working groups where the nuts and bolts of the standards are actually defined.   Working groups meet frequently and the members have to put their own company’s work on hold while they meet.   It’s a typically Socratic process where subgroups and teams hash out the details of a particular specification and then present and defend their proposal to the larger  group.  After an iterative process of proposals and working drafts, presentations and rebuttals, the final draft proposal is formally written up and presented to ‘Industry’ for comment and trial use before formal adoption.

We’re now seeing the beginnings of defined standards groups for the Internet of Things.  However, it’s important that we don’t end up with competing standards.   Some of this will shake out as the nascent IoT ecosystem matures but it’s important to coalesce the best ideas, practices, taxonomy, use cases, and business models in order to build a robust standard for the Internet of Things that will benefit all of us.

Here are some of the groups trying to get a grip on the whole IoT space before it things get out of control and become unmanageable.  I’m no engineer, and I can’t say that I fully understand how these groups will work together, but in order for things to move forward without too much chaos there should be some symbiosis between these entities.

  

Industrial Internet Consortium

This organization is backed by  AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM, and Intel.   The IIC describes itself as a “not-for-profit organization that catalyzes, coordinates, and manages the collaborative efforts of industry, academia, and the government to accelerate growth of the Industrial Internet.”  Its working committees include teams focused on four primary areas:   Technology, Architecture, Security, Marketing

“The Industrial Internet Consortium doesn’t establish standards – rather, we evaluate and organize existing standards, and we advocate for open standard technologies in order to ease the deployment of connected technologies. “ – Lynne Canavan, Senior Program Manager, IIC

The IIC proposes to “take the lead in establishing interoperability across various industrial environments for a more connected world”. Specifically, the consortium’s charter will be to encourage innovation by:

•      Utilizing existing and creating new industry use cases and test beds for real-world applications;
•      Delivering best practices, reference architectures, case studies, and standards requirements to ease deployment of connected technologies;
•      Influencing the global standards development process for internet and industrial systems;
•      Facilitating open forums to share and exchange real-world ideas, practices, lessons, and insights;
•      Building confidence around new and innovative approaches to security

 The IIC also maintains various ‘Testbeds’ conforming to IIC reference architecture where “solutions can be deployed and tested in a [controlled] environment that resembles real-world conditions.”

OpenInterconnect Consortium

The OIC has a stated goal of “defining the connectivity requirements and ensuring interoperability of the billions of devices that will make up the emerging Internet of Things”

This effort is backed by Atmel, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, Samsung, Wind River  It is the “intention of the OIC is to create standard specifications for interoperability across connected devices."

Based on the statements between these organizations, it appears that the IIC hopes to become a kind of secretariat for the nascent standards which the OIC hopes to be the author and developer of.

Internet of Things World Forum

The primary goal of the IoTWF is to accelerate the market adoption of the Internet of Things.  The focus here is on more growing the IoT at a macro level.  This group will focus more on driving adoption of whatever standards prove dominant and encouraging its members to work with one another to drive industry as a whole.  In the next IOT World Forum meeting (October 2014, Chicago), there will be talks and keynote addresses focusing on Smart Cities, the Smart Grid, Manufacturing Use Cases and industry-specific sessions, i.e, Retail, Oil and Gas, Transportation. , Healthcare, etc.

There are other groups and organizations hoping to elbow their way in to becoming major players in the IoT including the recently announced Thread initiative which plans to develop an IP based networking protocol to connect devices over a mesh network.  Thread's backers include Samsung, Google (Nest), and Silicon Labs among others.

And finally there’s the AllSeen Alliance which wants to “encourage widespread adoption and help accelerate the development and evolution of an interoperable peer connectivity and 

communications framework based on AllJoyn for devices and applications in the Internet of Everything”.  The reference to ‘Alljoyn’ points to an open source project by Qualcomm which provides a framework for interoperability among connected devices.

There clearly seems to be some overlap among some of these initiatives and I expect to see some shakeout, but this will be an exciting space to be in over the coming years and some good opportunities for companies with vision to put forward some great new solutions that will benefit all of us in ways big and small.

So there’s my take on the beginnings of enterprise trying to get a handle on the Internet of Things.  Clear as mud ?