Two announcements on M2M standardisation in a week

This week there have been been two announcements about M2M standardisation from august and highly respected bodies.

On Monday the ITU announced that it was setting up a Focus Group on the M2M service layer. It will "study and evaluate the M2M landscape and M2M work currently being undertaken by regional and national standards development organizations (SDOs), with a view to identifying a common set of requirements". All of the details of what they're planning to do can be found through the link.

Then on Wednesday there was this joint announcement from a gaggle* of Standards Developments Organisations (SDOs) including ETSI and TIA that they would also be developing a common set of standards for M2M. Again, you can see all the details of what they're doing by following the link.

There doesn't appear to be any reference between the two other than the fact that the ITU talks about how it will work closely with SDOs. Not, apparently, that closely given that the European, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and US SDOs all have a separate initiative going. It's also unclear how these initiatives relate to the GSC MSTF which has been carrying out some exploratory standardisation work up until now.

Of course I should also be praising these initiatives for attempting to introduce some much-needed standardisation. Given the diversity of this thing we call "M2M" it's going to be a painful task. I've rambled on in the past about how open APIs is not really that useful without having standardised APIs. With that in mind, wouldn't it be good if we just did it once? As the old adage goes: "the great thing about standards is that there are so many of them".

*I'm not sure what the collective noun for SDOs is. Perhaps 'contemplation'. I'd be interested to hear any suggestions.

Comments

Dan Warren said…
Think you find the collective noun for SDO's is a 'Partnership Project'...

Dan