A strategic alliance formed between the Open Interconnect Consortium and the Industrial Internet Consortium displays even furth the need for interoperability in the Internet of Things.

A recent press release announcing the strategic alliance agreement between the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) and the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) serves to underscore the idea that more open collaboration is necessary to develop the kind of interoperability necessary to ensure the success of the Internet of Things.

Under the collaborative, information-sharing agreement terms, the IIC will share its use-cases and architectural requirements from the perspective of the industrial market. The corresponding contribution by the OIC will focus on implementation; relying on the use-cases and architecture information to validate their feature specifications and open source project (IoTivity) in an effort to create a more streamlined implementation model–essentially bringing the use-cases into the realm of possibility.

With the proliferation and growth of IoT technologies, clustering and collaboration have been inevitable. However, going beyond open source, we also encourage the OIC and IIC to also embrace the OpenStand Principles to help secure an open future and open standards in support of the IoT. While there’s no guarantee the collaboration will conform to the OpenStand Principles, we see this collaboration between these two critical industry consortia as a positive step toward more open collaboration within industry. The OIC, with it’s more than 50 members including Dell, HP, Siemens, and Honeywell, and the IIC with its 141 member companies spread out over 20 countries, are certainly representative of some hugely influential global innovation and implementation potential.

Imad Sousou, Vice President of Intel’s of the Software and Services Group and General Manager of their Open Source Technology Center, is also the Vice President of the board at the OIC. According to him, the strategic liaison between the OIC and IIC is, “extremely complementary and a huge win for the industry. By ensuring the standards and associated open source software from the OIC support the use cases and requirements defined by the IIC, we can accelerate the delivery of an industrial-grade communications framework for the IoT.”

With 4.9 billion connected devices to be in use in 2015, the need for this kind of collaboration in the IoT space is paramount and we hope to see more industry consortia embracing the OpenStand Principles, such as open collaboration, in the future.