The Thread Group recently collaborated with the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) to work together in their mission to advance the adoption of connected home products. The Thread Group and OCF share many member companies who will benefit from this liaison agreement, and both groups are committed to driving improved cross-application interoperability and device connectivity in the connected home.
To help the internet of things realize its full potential, companies across the product development spectrum – including silicon, software, platform, and finished-goods - must ensure interoperability across common technology areas.
The organizations will work together to ensure that OCF’s application layer will be fully compatible with Thread’s low-power, secure and scalable IPv6-based wireless mesh network layer.
While the Thread Group focuses on the networking layer and OCF sits at the application layer, both support low-power technologies at the center of their approaches to the connected home. In addition, both technologies were designed to scale up from the internet of small things to the internet of larger things, which is an easier task than scaling down.
Together, the Thread Group and OCF are committed to providing consumers with a continuous and seamless product experience, and a fully-functioning connected home framework that is easy-to-use from setup and configuration, all the way through application-to-application interactions.
“Thread Group members identified and prioritized OCF as a strategically important application layer to run over the Thread wireless mesh network,” noted Thread Group president, Grant Erickson. “In order for consumers to put their faith in the connected home, their experience must be simple, reliable, and effortless. This agreement takes us one step closer to our common goal of ensuring that consumers will have smart home devices that seamlessly work together out of the box, regardless of their brand or function.”
“We work every day to unlock the opportunity of IoT that interoperability will enable,” said Mike Richmond, executive director, OCF. “But this collaboration with Thread is special. With Thread, we are able to provide both of our members with a joint solution that enables companies to more easily develop solutions for the connected home. ”
In June, OCF also announced updates to its specification, and available as standalone, reference implementation code, via the open source IoTivity project, which includes new functionality for developers. OCF plans to have certified products available on the market in 2016.
Updates include security enhancements, added functionality to the smart home development package, as well as added support for new industries to develop with the specification.
At the same time, the IoT standards body, added 31 new member organizations including Bose, Comcast, Fujitsu Limited, Somfy and Tata Consultancy, growing membership to nearly 200 companies dedicated to creating a common IoT standard. In addition, OCF announced updated functionality to its specification.
