As interest and demand for Internet of Things (IoT) technology grows, so too does membership in the AllSeen Alliance. The AllSeen Alliance announced today that it is adding 13 new members to its roster, including IBM, Pivotal, CertiVox, KONA S, Appception, Granite River Labs, Hackster, Novatel Wireless, Omni m2m, Visible Energy, Fabita, Skyworth and TOPEAST.
The AllSeen Alliance first got started in December of 2013 with a core code contribution from Qualcomm with the AllJoyn Framework. In 2015, membership growth in AllSeen has accelerated.
“The AllSeen Alliance has experienced double digit month-over-month membership growth since January 2015,” Philip DesAutels, senior director, IoT, AllSeen Alliance, told Enterprise Networking Planet. “We think this cadence of growth is an indication of market movement and increasing recognition that open source development is the only way to match the pace of IT demands in IoT.”
With the addition of the new 13 members, the AllSeen Alliance currently consists of 172 members.
The categories listed in the press release are just a means of explaining the areas of expertise these new members bring but are certainly not meant to limit their future contributions to the community. DesAutels explained that there are three official membership categories: Premier, Community and Sponsored. The 13 new members are joining the AllSeen Alliance at the Community Member level.
“All members who join the Alliance have a plethora of opportunities to contribute,” DesAutels said. “They have a voice in marketing direction and can participate in any of the six Working Groups within the AllSeen Alliance.”
From a technical development standpoint, to date there have been four major releases of AllJoyn from the AllSeen Alliance. DesAutels added that the framework is already in tens of millions of commercial products today, and with the launch of Windows 10, that number will increase drastically.
The next big update for AllJoyn will be the 15.09 release set to debut in September.
While AllSeen continues to grow, other IoT efforts also are popping up, which DesAutels sees as a real problem.
“We don’t have dozens of standards for the Web, and we don’t have dozens of standards for email and we don’t need dozens of standards for IoT,” DesAutels said. “To create an open ecosystem, a viable market and real customer value, we need a world where all of the connected products (services, apps, etc) speak a common language and share a common protocol.”
That said, he added that there are a variety of open source projects in different sectors of technology, and they often end up working together or complementing each other. IoT is an especially fast-moving industry with a great need for interoperability across industries.
“There is a lot of agreement on where we need to get as an industry, but where we differ is how we get there,” DesAutels said. “The great part is a large number of us are all heading in the same direction!”
While there are differences today, in time DesAutels said that the AllSeen Alliance would like to work together with all of the various consortiums and organizations that are sprouting up.
“We are already seeing many of them come to us to see how we can bridge technologies,” DesAutels said. “Thread, BACnet and Z-Wave are great examples of how AllJoyn can work with other technologies.”
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
