March 2020 - In this interview, Roland Hechwartner of Deutsche Telekom Group (DT) and Chairman for oneM2M's Technical Plenary (TP) describes several recent developments about oneM2M's membership base and the ease with which small and medium sized organisations are influencing IoT standardisation.
Q: What are some of the member participation highlights?
RH: There are so many different types of organisations that contribute to oneM2M and its international flavor. We recently held a week-long TP meeting in San Diego, hosted by Qualcomm. The West Coast venue for this TP gave standardization members an opportunity to meet with users. A good example is SGS - the inspection, verification, testing and certification company - who kindly hosted one of our meetings and provided a tour of their test and certification facilities.
From an administrative perspective, TP members elected Marianne Mohali (Orange, France) as a Vice Chair for the RDM working group. In addition, Andrew Min-gyu Han (Hansung University, Korea) was appointed as the new Work Programme Management Convenor.
oneM2M has always operated as an open institution that welcomes input from the wider IoT community. To illustrate what is possible, I want to highlight the way that specialists from the SME community are participating in oneM2M.
With support from the Small Business Standards (SBS) organisation, a European non-profit association, a group of services providers in the lifts sector submitted a new Work Item (WI-0098) to oneM2M. The smart lift sector is evolving quickly and standardisation of IoT support capabilities is of high priority for the smart lift manufacturers and associations of lift maintainers, especially in the SME area.
Some of the operational procedures this covers include maintenance, predictive maintenance, services to the operating technician, to the building owners, users and administrators, services for impaired people, emergency support, remote operation, city services, etc. The ongoing work within oneM2M will therefore, cover smart lifts use cases and roles, smart lifts requirements as well as smart lifts data model and references.
In addition to SBS, the other members that supported this initiative are Huawei Technologies Sweden, Nokia, Sensinov, TIM-Telecom Italia and TNO.
Q: oneM2M is extending its connections with China. What is the latest news on that front?
RH: By virtue of its size and large technology sector, China is an important market for several reasons. After much work over the past few months, I'm pleased to report that oneM2M is working with the IoT Connectivity Alliance (ICA) which was launched by the Alibaba Group. This is an open alliance which aims to widen industry collaboration and speed up the development of universal IoT standards.
The ICA has more than 350 members spanning the chip, sensor, module, intelligent hardware, cloud platform, software, security, and system integration industrial chains. You can read more in the press release which highlights a common objective for both organisations to develop a universal standard for the IoT.
Q: Finally, what's next?
RH: Our next Technical Plenary will take place in July and is likely to be a virtual meeting due to travel uncertainties for our members across the globe. After that, we will continue our cooperation with the ITU-T at the next meeting which will take place in Geneva, Switzerland.
