Industry of Things (IoT) analysts predict that more than 25 billion IoT devices will be connected and participating in the global internet by 2025 (Gartner) and the global smart home market is expected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2025 (IOT Analytics). This represents a huge innovation and business opportunity for IoT manufacturers’ devices and related services in the IoT landscape of the future.
Part of this growth is dependent on device interoperability. A consumer expects to buy an IoT device and have it work with another IoT device. Unfortunately, that isn’t always possible. We live in a world of fragmented, “walled garden” solutions, where a single manufacturer’s device speaks a proprietary protocol connected to a proprietary cloud environment with a connection to a vendor-centric mobile application used to configure and control that device. Standards do not apply – mostly.
However, there have been successful industry attempts to make things talk to each other using cloud-to-cloud application programming interfaces (APIs). But each vendor’s device cloud has an API that differs in technical approach and level of complexity. To connect, each vendor must develop and maintain a purpose-built, single API-to-API connection. For example, a device from Vendor A wanting to be controlled by Vendor B’s app requires a uniquely developed and maintained API-to-API connection. And given all the IoT devices connecting to all the IoT apps, this creates a “n to n” problem that is just not scalable for the industry. This lack of API standardization forces IoT vendors, businesses, and consumers to pay the high price of non-standard integrations.
Read the full article by Bryan Mann via EP&T.