I attended the IoT Central meetup in Manhattan last week. The meeting was held at Grand Central Tech – a great space at 335 Madison Avenue where Facebook once had NYC offices – and featured a presentation by Cisco’s IoT innovator, Maciej Kranz.
Kranz gave a top-notch overview of the history and current state of the IoT industry. He highlighted some use cases and early success stories and reviewed a few extremely interesting ROI scenarios. He also discussed some of the pain points the market has been experiencing and identified a couple areas that need to be addressed if the industry is to move IoT initiatives forward more quickly.
While I found the entire presentation both interesting and informative, given my background in positioning proven interoperable technologies in the digital identity, security and privacy sectors – and my proactive work with global technology consortia and standards bodies – I was very interested in what Kranz had to say about open standards in the IoT sector – and he said quite a bit.
I appreciated hearing Kranz state so clearly – and pretty much right after he began his open standards discussion – that he believes companies embracing open standards will be the ultimate winners in the IoT space. This is an important message for any developer or organization looking to begin – or expand on – IoT initiatives.
I also appreciated hearing Kranz’s dive down into what he sees as some of the IoT priorities tech consortia and standards bodies need to address. Those priorities included standardizing interfaces and standardizing the way sensors share data. Kranz went on to say that he felt it was important to have one agreed upon standard for solving common cross-industry IoT issues.
Kranz noted that there are many – in fact, dozens and dozens – of consortia working on a wide range of IoT challenges. I’ll highlight some of those organizations in upcoming articles. In the meantime, take a look at the Open Fog Consortium, an organization Kranz gave a shout-out to during his presentation. – Russ DeVeau
Related:
–Nokia, Alcatel and Here Maps – proactive storytelling, industry trends and top-notch spokespersons
–Russ DeVeau on communications and marketing for global standards bodies and technology consortia