A few months back when I first heard about the formation of the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) I thought to myself, “Do we really need another IoT standards organization?” But during my meeting with David McCall of Intel and Samsung’s Guy Martin while at the show, I got a clearer picture of how the OIC framework is working to stitch together existing technology to ease communications for the IoT developer.

Since its inception, the OIC has been working to define a common communications structure for wireless standards capable of automatically detecting, connecting, and managing devices regardless of form factor, OS, or service provider to help reduce fragmentation in IoT verticals. Rather than just another specification, however, the OIC provides an open source reference implementation through IoTivity.org, which is hosted by the Linux Foundation under an Apache 2.0 li-cense. This makes for the interesting paradigm of standards based on an open source project, meaning content could be contributed to the open source project by non-OIC members that eventually makes its way into the specification, and vice versa.

The consortium realizes that it won’t be possible to create one end all solution for every IoT deployment, but they hope to provide as much interoperability as possible in the short term with hopes for natural consolidation of various networking technologies down the line. The first draft of the OIC specification and a certification should be available in the first half of 2015, with compliant products shipping by the end of the year.

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