The Industrial Internet Consortium has released an extensive white paper on its model for industrial internet of things connectivity. As you might guess, the connectivity model is designed for technology developers, and corresponds, in general, to the Open Systems Interconnect seven-layer model.
As some of us might note, there are business analogies. With the embrace of OSI, applications now are written to be independent of access media and network platforms; as well as independent of devices and operating systems, to a large extent. In such an environment, though there still remain vertical integration opportunities, the basic framework is openness.
But that also means business models are less amenable to “lock in” based on specific protocols, networks or access media. So it is worth noting that, above the the “framework” layer (structured data) is the unnamed “business model” layer, where businesses with revenue models decide to use IIoT.
It is natural that ecosystem participants in the communications segments focus on “how” to achieve ubiquitous communications for IoT. Ultimately, as always is the case, business value will determine whether IoT is embraced, and therefore whether markets for communication services are created.
