Greg Burns is the AllSeen Alliance TSC Chair
It seems self-evident. To achieve the promise of the Internet of Everything – a state of ubiquitous communication among a variety of everyday objects and devices – you need all these things to be on the same page in terms of compatibility.
But that is not the case today. Individual vendors have pursued the vision, but none has gained widespread traction. That’s because the very nature of the Internet of Everything requires a cross-industry, cross-platform and interoperable solution that discovers and connects devices, appliances, systems and services regardless of brand; and most importantly standardizes the language and terminology that devices use to communicate with each other.
Enter the AllSeen Alliance, announced today, the broadest cross-industry consortium to date to work on this problem. The AllSeen Alliance’s mission is to foster the Internet of Everything through a common, open code base that enables interoperability and security among a wide range of devices – consumer electronics, appliances and even something as small as a light switch as well as a host of enterprise and industrial use cases.
That code base is an open framework based on the AllJoyn™ open source project, which was originally developed by and is being contributed to the Alliance by Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc., Qualcomm’s open source subsidiary. It consists of a code base that addresses such fundamental requirements as discovery, pairing, message routing and security, ensuring interoperability among even the most basic devices and systems.
The initial set of capabilities include: service discovery (learning about the features, functions of other nearby devices); onboarding to add a device to the user’s network; user notifications; a common control panel for creating rich user experiences; and audio streaming for simultaneous playback on multiple speakers.
In addition, the AllSeen Alliance will produce developer tools and verify correct implementation through a compliance program. Workgroups at launch include: Multimedia, Compliance, Basic Services, Core and Developer Tools.
We’re starting with 23 members from consumer electronics to networking to retail and the enterprise but we expect more companies and individuals to join the Alliance and/or contribute to and adopt the framework for their own products in the months ahead. Open development means that anyone looking to build an open solution can get involved and contribute to the evolution of the code base. Now, the many industry leaders who have come together in the AllSeen Alliance can innovate on top of the open framework and make real the vision of a simple, seamless experience that connects people to the things around them.