The future is bright and, if the industry is right, it’s going to be really, really connected. Gartner predicts that by 2020, 30 billion things will be connected and that every product selling for $100 or more will be smart. The IoT industry continues to grow and rapidly evolve, and as varying protocols and differing standards arise, we’ve observed a corresponding rise in confusion. That’s understandable; with so many groups trying to do similar things, it’s understandable why the text on the various groups’ website can be largely indistinguishable.
Not surprisingly, many of the IoT groups share a similar mission – enabling a world where billions and billions of things interact together, securely, easily, and safely. It’s the approach they take to get there that is the fundamental difference to understand between the various organizations and their work.
Traditional standards organizations work (often in private) to create their view of how something should work – that is they create a standard specification against which a particular real-world implementation may be compared. Historically this has often led to a nightmare of competing implementations, each satisfying the specification but via each implementers interpretation yielding a morass of non-interoperable products and services. To attempt to address this, some standards organizations go a step further and offer a reference implementation that shows how you might take the standard to implementation, but even then the reference implementation is often incomplete. Those dependent on that code find their products left out in the cold while the drivers of the specification ponder theories and prioritize their own requirements. It’s the rare standards organization that goes the final mile to provide open, free, and production-ready code that companies can build products with.
There is a place and time for standards, but in an emerging space where everything is evolving rapidly and simultaneously, it’s unreasonable to say, “this is the one and only way to the IoT.” IoT is an ecosystem being built from the contributions of the many, evolving over time, and shifting as the market matures. There are billions of connected devices that exist today and billions more to come and any IoT platform must embrace looking backward and forward rather than asking history, and the industry, to come to them.
The AllSeen Alliance and its AllJoyn project exist to allow anyone seeking to build connected devices and services the opportunity to access, use, and modify to suit their needs a shared protocol that is fully unencumbered by patents, licenses, or proprietary lock-in from any company. Our nearly 200 members back and invest in AllJoyn, celebrating many advantages beyond unencumbered access to the code. Our five Working Groups are open to the world; this means anyone can join the calls, attend the face to face meetings, access the Wiki, listen to the recordings, join the mailing lists and contribute to the code base. We don’t discriminate against who and how you participate because we are open.
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