PICMG (United States) - PICMG, a not-for-profit 501(c) consortium of companies and organizations that collaboratively develop open specifications has announced a work register has been formed with the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to collaborate on IIoT efforts. The DMTF, an industry standards organization, creates open manageability standards spanning diverse emerging and traditional IT infrastructures including cloud, virtualization, network, servers and storage. 

The alliance between the organizations will help ensure the groups’ standards are coordinated and aligned in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) domain. It will advance collaboration between the two groups as PICMG specifies Redfish® Application Programming Interface (API) resources to create a meta-data model for IIoT. PICMG will also create and maintain Redfish extensions to support IIoT system deployments.

“DMTF welcomes extensions from its Alliance Partners and OEMs to Redfish, our standard API designed to deliver simple and secure management for converged, hybrid IT and the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC),” said Jeff Hilland, president, DMTF. “We’re pleased to be working with PICMG in the IIoT space to further unify the industry around the Redfish API.” 

“The collaboration with DMTF allows us to accelerate the adoption of IIoT with efficient development of relevant open standards and design guidelines,” said Jessica Isquith, president of PICMG. “Working together, our two organizations will extend DMTF’s Redfish® as a standard API to support IoT devices for industrial automation.”

PICMG specifications have long-standing usage in industrial automation going back to 1994. Dozens of the organization’s members have high-performance embedded computing products in industrial gateway, controller, and other applications based on specifications such as CompactPCI Serial, COM Express, and more. With a growing installed base of advanced hardware from dozens of member company vendors, PICMG is taking the next step in connected computing. The open standards development group for embedded computing is creating a model to facilitate a distributed network of sensors, each of which act as a micro-server. The combination of the meta-data model for a connected sensor network along with a wealth of versatile open standard hardware possibilities may finally provide the market a “plug and play” path for end-to-end IIoT interoperability.