By Betty Zhao, Haier U+

 The OCF China Forum held it’s first event this past May, graciously hosted by the China Electric Institute (CEI) in Guangzhou, China. The event saw a great turnout, with 112 attendees from more than 70 companies.

As participants of this kick-off event were new to the OCF, the goal was to give a high-level overview of IoTivity and OCF, including our core goals, implementations, and security aspects. We hoped attendees would leave with the impression that OCF is a viable solution and be motivated to learn more about the Foundation.

The event began with an introduction from CEI’s Ruixun Kong, Chair of the OCF China Forum, who discussed the Forum’s goals, organizational structure, and membership. I provided an overview of the OCF standard and open source solutions. This was followed by an OCF security overview led by Zhao Ru of OPPO, and an OCF certification introduction from Answer Sung of UL. Attendees then learned about OCF system development, hearing an OCF prototype development experience from Yonghua Li of Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. The event closed with device demonstrations from Sure Universal, Haier U+ and OPPO.

This was a highly productive event, as we successfully established the OCF China Forum’s organizational structure and set up the communication channel between our 63 member companies. Attendees showed great interest in the OCF, indicated they have plans to continue learning more about the Foundation post-event, and make OCF their IoT implementation of choice moving forward.

Why the OCF?

The current state of the IoT industry in China includes many competing IoT platforms owned by major companies, but there remains a lack of widely adopted industry standards and true open source solutions for SMEs to implement. The OCF China Forum believes the OCF provides a technical solution for all IoT scenarios, including device-to-device, device-to-cloud, and cloud-to-cloud. The OCF provides an advanced and reliable security mechanism to combat the impending security threat to the IoT, and its IoTivity project enables an easy, fast, and low-cost way to implement OCF solutions.

The goal of the OCF China Forum is to educate the Chinese IoT community about the OCF and its IoT solutions. The IoT industry in China is currently lacking awareness of the OCF standards due primarily to the language barrier and lack of promotion. We want to convey that OCF technology is mature and ready for business deployment and provides the answer to the many problems faced by the IoT in China and around the world.

OCF China Forum Initiatives

The OCF China Forum initiatives include:

• Encourage and promote the creation of OCF-certified devices.
• Host summits for active members and newcomers to share new developments on implementation.
• Host developer trainings to update and educate members on the developments of OCF/IoTivity tools.
• Assist member companies with government projects and business contracts.
• Combat the current language barrier by translating the OCF China standard and promoting the OCF as the go-to standard for the Chinese IoT ecosystem.
• Set up a comprehensive OCF China Forum website.

I want to thank all member companies that attended our first event. We look forward to advancing the OCF China Forum’s mission of promoting the OCF as China’s premier IoT industry standard.

For more information on the China Forum and its upcoming events, please visit our webpage here.