Liat Ben-Zur, Chairwoman of AllSeen Alliance

Today a small group of companies announced an effort to address Internet of Things (IoT) interoperability. We are happy to see our industry peers affirming the goals and objectives the AllSeen Alliance made six months ago about needing a common interoperable platform for IoT. The opportunities and complexities inherent in this major industry transformation are great, and it will take all of us working together to build the future of ubiquitously connected devices.

The AllSeen Alliance was formed to overcome the interoperability challenges that impede the Internet of Things. One of the greatest things about open source is the ability to collaborate across company lines and industries, and this initiative has really demonstrated the power of open source to advance technologies and enable change.  The initial code of the AllJoyn open source project to the Alliance just 6 months ago have already undergone many transformations and improvements thanks to various members of the Alliance and the open source community. And there are many more features and advancements on the Alliance’s roadmap that members are actively working on. From QEO’s Data-driven APIs and security enhancements contributed by Technicolor, to new lighting service APIs and connected lighting framework from LIFX, to a new gateway agent from Affinegy, software update services from Red Bend and upcoming smart home gateway from Haier, the AllSeen Alliance’s hosted open source project is evolving at unprecedented speeds.

Our Alliance has quickly evolved to over 50 organizations from all over the world representing a wide breadth of industries. We joined forces under a shared belief that a common, universal framework created through collaborative development was the only way to move this market forward. And we all share a vision that working together we can do more and be more successful than working on our own.

Interoperability cannot be achieved in a fragmented industry, and the Internet of Everything doesn’t work unless the “everything” works together. The members and developers that make up the AllSeen Alliance recognize this and are working around the clock to expand upon the AllJoyn protocol to create a truly connected experience for the Internet of Everything.

I’m humbled to see the growing support and technical progress being made within this community. Rather than having an organization that spends a lot of time debating specs and writing hundreds of pages of docs that then need to be interpreted and implemented by different companies, the AllSeen Alliance members are focused on what contributions of code they want to make to advance the work. If something is missing in the AllJoyn framework, our members are actively putting in effort to fix it or improve it. We welcome any company to join and do the same.

Here’s a snapshot of where we are today:

  • Nine Premier Members and 42 Community Members
  • Eight Working Groups led by member organizations who are actively working to better the code through additional features and enhancements like security and lighting.
  • Two versions of AllJoyn released under the Alliance, including SDKs
  • AllJoyn scalability across all HLOS platforms, from Android to iOS to Linux, OpenWRT and Windows as well as to all kinds of embedded RTOS solutions with extremely limited memory and processing power.
  • Members like Fon, LG, LIFX, Local Motors, Musaic, Muzzley and Two Bulls collaborating with one another and integrating the AllJoyn framework into existing solutions or products to enhance user experience.
  • Commercial launch of AllJoyn-enabled products, with more to come

Two of the ways I measure the success of an open source project is the critical mass supporting the effort and the value of the technology itself. I’m excited to be a part of an initiative that can tout both. We are seeing many organizations, standards bodies and alliances reaching out to see how they can adopt parts of AllJoyn or build bridges to our ecosystem. We very much welcome that and hope we can continue to drive more interoperability and avoid fragmentation.

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