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AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel form consortium for IoT

Five major players in telecom and industry are joining forces to accelerate interoperability in the development of the Internet of Things through industrial Internet applications.

AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel have formed the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), which is an open membership, not-for-profit group that plans to take the lead in establishing interoperability across various industrial environments for a more connected world,” according to a statement by the founding members. The IIC, they said, will focus on breaking down technology silos in order to support better access to big data and improve “integration of the physical and digital worlds.”

The same companies and others have also been involved in developing in an industrial Internet group with the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), which was explored during the course of 2013.

Brian Partridge, vice president of research with Yankee Group, said in a research note that “it appears that the original members of the consortium that was formed last summer to work on common architectural frameworks to drive the Industrial Internet in combination with NIST want to take that work a logical step further.

“The problem, as I see it, is the unavoidable duplication of effort and resultant confusion as several well-established standards bodies or private consortia—the AllSeen Alliance, ITU, GSMA, 3GPP, oneM2M and AllJoyne, to name but a few—are also tackling the same challenges,” Partridge added.

 “Who will win?  That will take years to shake out, if it does at all,” Partidge wrote. “If the Industrial Internet Consortium is to move the needle at all beyond the fruit of its own commercial collaborations, it will require global and crowd-sourced participation from overseas tech vendors, governments, standards groups and vertical industry consortia. Building all of those interfaces to herd such a diverse group of cats could prove infinitely harder than creating standards. That said, the companies involved wield incredible influence in the spheres of IT and IoT/M2M. We will clearly need to pay attention to the outcomes of this work.”

Elements of the IIC’s charter include creating new industry use cases and test beds; creating best practices, reference architectures and standards requirements to streamline deployments of connected technologies; working with global standards development processes for Internet and industrial systems; and building confidence in new security approaches.

All five founding members will hold permanent seats on an IIC steering committee, along with four elected members. The IIC will be managed by Object Management Group (OMG), which is a non-profit trade association in Boston.

The founding companies noted that the federal government is investing more than $100 million per year in research and development related to what is known as cyberphysical systems, exploring them in areas including healthcare, transportation, security for the electrical grid, and other smart city concepts.

“As leaders, we have come together to drive the ecosystem and market development of Industrial Internet applications and ensure organizations around the world can more easily create better services, access better data, and most importantly, seamlessly connect all the pieces together,” said Bill Ruh, vice president, GE Global Software, in a statement. “The IIC has been established to achieve this goal through the creation of common architectures and use cases that will enable businesses in aviation, transportation, healthcare or energy to ‘plug-and-play’ Industrial Internet technologies anywhere, anytime.”

 

ABOUT AUTHOR

Kelly Hill
Kelly Hill
Kelly reports on network test and measurement, as well as the use of big data and analytics. She first covered the wireless industry for RCR Wireless News in 2005, focusing on carriers and mobile virtual network operators, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. Follow her on Twitter: @khillrcr