Open Connectivity Foundation


The Open Connectivity Foundation is an industry organization having as its stated mission is to develop specification standards, promote a set of interoperability guidelines, and provide a certification program for devices involved in the Internet of Things. It has become one of the biggest industrial connectivity standards organizations for IoT, including in its membership Samsung Electronics, Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm and Electrolux. Currently, there are more than 300 member companies.
The OCF tries to realize the Internet of Things also called Network of Everything. The IoT requires easy discovery, and trusted and reliable connectivity between things. The OCF delivers a framework that enables these requirements via a specification, a reference implementation and a certification program. IoTivity, the open source reference implementation of the specifications, is actively developed by different members of the OCF.

History

The Open Interconnect Consortium began as an industry group whose stated mission was to develop standards and certification for devices involved in the Internet of Things based around Constrained Application Protocol. OIC was created in July 2014 by Intel, Broadcom, and Samsung Electronics. Broadcom left the consortium shortly after it was established, due to a disagreement on how to handle intellectual property.
In September 2015 a release candidate of the specification in version 1.0 for the core framework, smart home device, resource type, security and remote access capabilities was released to the public, accessible also for non members without registration.
On February 19, 2016 the OIC changed its name to the Open Connectivity Foundation and added Microsoft, Qualcomm and Electrolux to its membership.
Currently, there are more than 300 other member partners, including OCF "Diamond Members" companies; Cisco Systems, Qualcomm, Intel, Microsoft, CableLabs, Electrolux, LG, Haier, Canon, and Samsung.
In November 2018 it was announced version 1 of the standard has been ratified by International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 30118-1:2018.
In November, 2019, OCF released a draft Cloud API for Cloud Services specification in addition to existing Device-to-Device and Device-to-Cloud Service specifications.