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.
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.”
