New Service-provider and Business-model Disruption in the IIoT
This is economically inefficient as measured by device (or sensor) duplication and associated
management overheads. It also hinders service and business-model innovation by narrowing the
opportunity to create value either through proprietary gateway designs or systems integration
activities.
One of the early conclusions from the Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC) pioneering testbed
activities is that testbeds exhibit a high degree of commonality among IIoT service-enablement
functions, independently of vertical use-case specifications. This is a general characteristic of
future IIoT application delivery models. The logical conclusion is the need for open horizontal
platforms for which the IIC established its Open Horizontal Test-bed Program (OHTP ).
For a horizontal platform to be effective, participating service providers have to work to a
standard. At one level, this ensures technical interoperability. On another level, individual
platform users benefit from a set of standard operating procedures. This ensures a coherent and
communal set of rules for resource sharing, data/service monetization and the application of
privacy and security-management policies.
Just like the Internet and its many backbone service providers, the IIoT market will support
multiple horizontal platforms for competitive reasons. Geographic and regulatory factors about
data governance will also play a role.
Some platforms will specialize in key verticals such as communications services, intelligent
transport services and smart city services, for example. However, by adhering to a common
standard, there is no technical reason to prevent these platforms and their IIoT applications from
interoperating. This means that smartphone-based applications from the telecommunications
sector could interact with environmental sensors or smart-utility applications. Similarly,
platforms for consumer-oriented, connected-car applications could interoperate with intelligent
transport and smart city platforms.
Future IIoT systems will support interoperability and common service-enablers for IIoT
applications. These will enable multiple organizations to cooperate through common operating
procedures and multi-sided, commercial models.
2.2
Common IIoT-service Enablers for Interoperability
Upon activating multiple IIoT applications and their associated devices via associated AEPs and
CDPs, there are two sets of requirements to support interoperability. The first is a set of basic
functions for data producers (devices and sensors) and data-consumers (IIoT application logic) to
publish, subscribe and process data streams within a coherent operating framework. In relation
to Figure 1, a device belonging to App #1 can publish its data stream and have App #1 and App
#3 subscribe to it.
The second set of requirements corresponds to a group of common service capabilities. These
standardize basic functions such as data collection, data storage and data publication. Alongside
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