Open-source community has important role in IIoT market growth

The Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™), the worlds leading organization transforming business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and Linaro Ltd, the open source collaborative engineering organization developing software for the Arm® ecosystem, announced they have agreed to a liaison to work together to advance their shared interests. Under the agreement, the IIC and Linaro will work together to promote the digital economy by preventing fragmentation and harmonizing various aspects in the fields of the industrial internet.

A new contributing group will be formed as part of the IIC Liaison Working Group, which is the IICs gateway for formal relationships with standards and open-source organizations, consortia, alliances, certification and testing bodies and government entities/agencies. This contributing group will consist of IIC members co-chaired by Linaro, Huawei and Arm and it will output documents defining requirements for shared engineering work, which will be fed into Linaros Edge & Fog Computing Group (LEDGE).

"Open source communities are an integral part of accelerating the IIoT market adoption," said Wael William Diab, IIC Liaison Working Group Chair and Secretary of the IIC Steering Committee, "the liaison with Linaro reinforces the comprehensive ecosystem of liaison partnerships that IIC is building, which include SDOs, government initiatives and regional organizations, industry consortia and open source communities."

The contributing group will focus on identifying joint activities that may include identifying and sharing best practices; realizing interoperability by harmonizing architecture and other elements; collaborating on standardization, including input into the 96Boards industrial edition specification; and collecting input on short term roadmaps for Over-The-Air (OTA) updates, Time Sensitive Networking TSN, and trustworthiness.

"Many companies are investing heavily in developing products for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) provides a framework on which to develop an extensive range of test beds. Linaro enables its members to collaborate on foundational open source software projects, creating more accessible and non-fragmented access to the latest Arm-based technology," said Francois-Frederic Ozog, Director of the Linaro Edge & Fog Computing Group. "We expect the work of the IIC will help Linaro understand a broad range of industry requirements and the relative priority of different engineering tasks. This will enable Linaro to help accelerate support for IIoT in open source projects for its members and their customers."

"As we drive towards a world of a trillion connected devices, it is essential that engineers can implement securely connected industrial systems quickly and efficiently," said Mark Hambleton, vice president open source software, Arm. "This partnership will enable the ecosystem to further collaborate on a range of software and standards that are common to a vast array of Arm-based systems used in the IIoT, fueling further innovation."

About the Industrial Internet Consortium
The Industrial Internet Consortium is the worlds leading membership program transforming business and society by accelerating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). The IIC delivers a trustworthy IIoT in which the worlds systems and devices are securely connected and controlled to deliver transformational outcomes. The Industrial Internet Consortium is a program of the Object Management Group (OMG).

About Linaro
Linaro is leading collaboration on open source development in the Arm ecosystem. The company has over 300 engineers working on consolidating and optimizing open source software for the Arm architecture, including developer tools, the Linux kernel, Arm power management, and other software infrastructure. Linaro is distribution neutral: it wants to provide the best software foundations to everyone by working upstream, and to reduce non-differentiating and costly low level fragmentation. The effectiveness of the Linaro approach has been demonstrated by Linaros growing membership, and by Linaro consistently being listed as one of the top five company contributors, worldwide, to Linux kernels since 3.10.

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