OIC Advances Spec for Cloud-Native IoT Applications

In a development that bodes well for the inevitable convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing, the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) today revealed the components that will make up a technical specification that promises to accelerate the deployment of IoT applications that are cloud native.

Mike Richmond, executive director for OIC, said the public candidate for the OIC Candidate Specification 1.0 covers the core framework, smart home device, resource type, security and remote access capabilities. In the future, Richmond said OIC will expand the specification to cover specific types of IoT use cases.

A cloud native application, added Richmond, is defined as one that takes advantage of modern IT architectures based on microservices and REST application programming interfaces (APIs). In essence, Richmond said OIC is committed to providing access to a common set of technologies for building these cloud-native IoT applications.

Those technologies, said Richmond, will either be provided under a royalty-free license or under fair and reasonable terms under which the developer of the technologies promises to charge everyone using the technology the same reasonable fee based on how the technology is being applied. Once the specification is ratified it will then become a core component of the open source IoTivity project, which will provide a framework for building IoT applications. The IoTivity project itself is being managed under the auspices of The Linux Foundation.

Supporters of the OIC project now number more than 30, including vendors such as IBM, National Instruments, Honeywell International and Marvell Technology Group Ltd. The China Academy of Information and Communications is also a member.

In general, Richmond said that while companies are anxious to build and deploy IoT applications a more deliberate approach is warranted given how broadly these applications will be deployed. Richmond noted the success of the cloud computing industry as a whole has been predicated on open standards. As such, the same process needs time to play out to foster the development of IoT applications that will largely run on a mix of public and private clouds, said Richmond.

While there are more than a few IoT initiative in the work, Richmond said solution providers and their customers would be well-advised to paying extra attention to the terms under which various IoT technologies are being provided. Given the scale at which most IoT applications are designed to operate at Richmond said it’s quite conceivable that an IoT application that make use of proprietary commercial technologies could wind up having costs that run into the millions of dollars. The open source process may take more time to come to fruition, but in the case Richmond said patience is its own reward.