Is the end of the “warring states” in the Internet of Things coming?

Author | Wang Jinwang

Produced by | Leifeng.com Industry Group

On December 18, 2019, Amazon, Apple, Google and others jointly established the "Connected Home Over IP" (CHIP) working group based on the Zigbee Alliance to solve the compatibility, security and connectivity problems in the current smart home market.

After learning that Apple, Google, and Amazon had established this alliance, Academician Ni Guangnan felt that China should have its own voice and should not wait for others to formulate standards and then passively join in.

Especially in the field of Internet of Things, we started relatively early and there is no reason for us to fall behind Europe and the United States.

Therefore, Academician Ni wrote a letter to Minister Xiao Yaqing, who also attached great importance to this matter. He approved Vice Minister Wang Zhijun, who was in charge of this matter, to follow up on the matter. Vice Minister Wang Zhijun then asked the Science and Technology Department to conduct research.

…

At the founding conference of the OLA Alliance, Li Yizhong, President of the China Federation of Industrial Economics and former Minister of Industry and Information Technology, specifically mentioned the story behind the establishment of this alliance, and he also agreed with Academician Ni Guangnan's national sentiments.

There is no doubt that the CHIP Alliance, led by the three major American technology giants, means that the American smart home industry may break the deadlock of each operating independently and move towards unity on standard protocols.

On December 1, the Open Link Alliance (OLA) was officially established, marking a milestone for China's Internet of Things industry to move from an "enterprise-level ecosystem" to an "industry-level ecosystem."

It has to be said that after more than a decade of crazy growth, the most fundamental interconnection and interoperability of domestic smart home and other IoT vertical industries is still a headache.

In order to solve the problem of high fragmentation in the IoT industry, Internet giants including BAT and home appliance giants including Haier and Midea have built their own IoT ecosystems. In addition, local industry alliances and organizations have gradually emerged in various places, forming a situation of "feudal princes" similar to the Warring States Period.

This pattern has promoted the emergence of local IoT standards to a certain extent, but it is difficult to achieve ultimate unification.

In order to truly realize the interconnection and interoperability of the Internet of Things and enable one APP to control all brands and all home appliances in the home, such standard setting requires a non-profit organization that can bring together various companies and has sufficient authority.

Under the guidance and support of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, 24 academicians of the two academies of my country jointly initiated and established the OLA Alliance with Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Xiaomi, Huawei, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, China Telecom, China Mobile and other units.

Academician Ni Guangnan specifically pointed this out at the conference.

The OLA Alliance is an IoT alliance that is highly anticipated by all sectors in China. It is also the strongest IoT alliance in China that can break the "warring states" situation of China's IoT and even gain a place in the formulation of international IoT standards.

What kind of lineup should the strongest IoT alliance have?

According to the information released by the conference, the current organizational structure of the OLA Alliance is as follows:

• Chairman: Ni Guangnan, academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and researcher at the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Chief Advisor: Li Yizhong, President of the China Federation of Industrial Economics and former Minister of Industry and Information Technology

• Co-Advisor: Liu Duo, President of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology

• Chairman of the Expert Committee: He Jifeng, academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, computer software scientist, and deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Information Science Department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Secretary-General: Gao Hong, Director of the Technology Department of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology and Telsit Terminal Laboratory

• The secretariat is located in China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. The executive committee is divided into two major directions: professional groups and field groups. The professional groups (including connection technology group, open source group, security technology group, AI technology group, testing technology group, etc.) are committed to the research and formulation of basic technical standards and general technologies for unified connection of the Internet of Things; the field groups (including smart home appliances group, building and energy group, smart manufacturing group, and robot group) carry out demand analysis and technical applications across application fields of the Internet of Things.

The OLA Alliance currently has 9 chairman units, including Alibaba, Baidu, JD.com, Xiaomi, Haier, Huawei, China Telecom, China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, and China Mobile, 18 director units, 38 ordinary member units, and a total of 65 member units. The composition of the board of directors is shown in the figure below:

Ni Guangnan pointed out that “OLA Alliance will be committed to formulating corresponding standards for the intelligent connection of all things, achieving mutual recognition and interoperability with global standards, and promoting the development of related technologies and industries.”

The main goal of such a powerful lineup is to "create a unified connection standard for the Internet of Things."

Before the OLA Alliance, leading companies in the industry such as Alibaba, Huawei, Haier, and Midea had been working on "creating a unified connection standard for the Internet of Things" for many years and had formed their own Internet of Things ecosystems.

In this regard, Academician He Jifeng pointed out at the conference:

In recent years, some industry leaders have begun to aggregate industry partners and build enterprise-level ecosystems, using this as a starting point to transition to scene-based intelligence. In this process, they have also achieved a lot of success.

However, if we want to create true full-product intelligence, we need to achieve cross-system and cross-industry interconnection and interoperability, break the scope of the ecosystem, and upgrade from an "enterprise-level ecosystem" to an "industry-level ecosystem."

As the Secretary General of the OLA Alliance, Gao Hong also emphasized this point:

In the process of platform-type enterprises gathering industrial resources, it has played a very important role in enabling the Internet of Things to move from fragmented connections to small-scale aggregation of "enterprise-level ecosystems". However, the aggregation of this "small ecosystem" cannot fully reflect the full-scenario nature of the entire Internet of Things.

We believe that the Internet of Things has begun to move from an "enterprise-level ecosystem" to an "industry-level ecosystem" and has reached the stage of truly unified connection protocols and the development of the entire industry ecosystem.

The IoT ecosystem has upgraded from an "enterprise-level ecosystem" to an "industry-level ecosystem", becoming a macro direction for the future development of the IoT vertical industry . Among them, the OLA Alliance will take the smart home industry as a breakthrough point and carry out "a series of work such as industry research, demand analysis, standard prediction, open source development, testing and evaluation, and application demonstration."

Regarding the issue of "building a unified IoT connection standard", the OLA Alliance currently focuses on device discovery and network configuration, access authentication, control, and object models. Gao Hong also pointed out:

The underlying layer currently mainly supports Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth, and will further support other connection technologies such as cellular, PLC, Zigbee, etc. in the future. By opening up the entire application layer access connection protocol, it will leave more room for development for the IoT software platform layer, and we will work together to develop towards all scenarios.

At the end of the conference, Minister Li Yizhong, as the chief consultant of the alliance, also made three suggestions for the alliance's work:

First, it is feasible to use smart homes as a breakthrough point for interconnection and interoperability. We have a foundation in this regard, but we hope to accelerate the shift to digital transformation in industry and manufacturing.

Second, the core of the new infrastructure is digital infrastructure. The industrial Internet is one of the key tasks of the new infrastructure. The industrial Internet includes almost all new-generation information technologies. The study of the Internet of Things should be placed within the industrial Internet and penetrated into enterprises.

Third, standards and practices go hand in hand and complement each other.

The establishment of the OLA Alliance may have a far-reaching impact on the development of the domestic Internet of Things industry. From the establishment of the first standard project at the beginning of the year to the convening of the first council and founding meeting of the alliance today, the alliance has gone through a process from scratch in this extraordinary year. At the same time, the alliance has also made clear plans for the development of the coming year. Leifeng.com summarizes the key development nodes and plans of the OLA Alliance announced at the meeting as follows:

• In April 2020, the first standard project of the OLA Alliance was launched;
• In June 2020, the OLA Alliance held its first preparatory meeting;
• In October 2020, the OLA Alliance held a preparatory meeting;
  
• In December 2020, the first council and founding conference of the OLA Alliance was held;
• At the end of 2020, the draft standard of the OLA Alliance was released;
• In Q1 2021, the first DEMO product based on the OLA standard was developed;
• In Q1 2021, the official version of the OLA standard will be released;
• In Q2 2021, OLA will be open source and the first OLA SDK will be released;
  
• In Q3 2021, OLA module samples will be released;
  
• In Q3 2021, the OLA Alliance Certification Laboratory will be put into operation;
  
• In Q4 2021, OLA’s first batch of certification certificates were issued and commercial products were launched.
  

Secretary-General Gao Hong also pointed out at the meeting, "We are not only doing domestic interconnection, our goal is to go global."

Obviously, the establishment of the OLA Alliance and the formulation of the OLA standard will be an attempt to unify the domestic IoT standards, and it may also be another important attempt for domestic IoT standards to impact international IoT standards.