After seven months of collaboration, Intel and its partners in the Open Interconnect Consortium are finally launching the initial release of their much-anticipated standard for machine-to-machine communications. The protocol is meant to allow the billions of connected devices set to fly out of factories in the coming years to freely exchange information.

That interoperability, if and when it materializes, could open up an entire universe of new use cases spanning both the consumer and corporate worlds. The chip maker and the 47 other companies in the group envision a future in which historically analog systems will interact with each other to greatly enhance our quality of life. But that’s only if device and software makers can overcome compatibility issues.

For lack of a better choice, vendors have been implementing homegrown data sharing capabilities in their connected products, but IoTivity, a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project with a name that’s a play on the acronym for the Internet of Things, aims to change that.

The standard offers a common language for devices from any manufacturer and across every segment, at least in theory. It’s implemented as cross-platform middleware that developers can use to make their applications interoperable with other services that use the protocol, regardless of the particular system the latter happen to run on.

But the biggest challenge to meeting the goal of seamless data sharing is not technical. Rather, it’s gaining adoption from manufacturers that have already committed to homegrown communications standards, a barrier Intel and its allies hope their sheer market leverage will help overcome.

The Open Interconnect Consortium is not the only industry group vying to fill the opening for a universal connectivity standard. The AllSeen Alliance is developing its own machine-to-machine communications protocol under the leadership of Intel rival Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., while the UK government is spearheading an effort to develop a protocol of protocols that can enable services to exchange data without requiring any major code modifications.

Only time will tell if IoTivity will become the preferred communications protocol in the connected universe, but Intel and its allies appear to be doing their utmost to make that happen. The consortium is moving fast, with a reference implementation already in the works.

image courtesy of Erin Lubin