The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) and the IPSO Alliance (IPSO) announced Tuesday that IPSO has transferred its assets, work and memberships to the OMA, forming a joint organization called OMA SpecWorks.
All technical working groups from IPSO and OMA remain active and are tasked with creating and driving a set of global technical deliverables in the mobile and internet of things (IoT) services layer. OMA SpecWorks leverages OMA’s vast experience to allow developers to quickly transform an idea into an industry specification and then manage the specification’s publication and maintenance.
OMA SpecWorks delivers a streamlined, efficient approach to standards development focused on the needs of its working groups, which are given a high level of autonomy. Members of a working group define their own cadence and work style to fit what best achieves the technical goals of their group. The OMA SpecWorks process is focused on enabling working groups to create quality technical outputs.
The OMA SpecWorks Process defines a basic, comprehensive set of steps and tools for developing technical specifications. The Working Groups (WG) are free to follow and enhance these optional guidelines or define their own.
The Approval Criteria for publication, created and approved by the OMA SpecWorks Board, aim to ensure the quality and homogeneity of the Technical Specifications published by OMA SpecWorks WGs. Once the technical specifications created by the WGs meet these criteria they can be accepted for Board Ratification and publication. These criteria are clearly defined and available to all the WGs.
The OMA SpecWorks staff ensure compliance to the Approval Criteria at the time of submission for Board Ratification, and are also the safe-keepers of the OMA SpecWorks Process and Approval Criteria as defined by the Board.
A global forum comprising a diverse international membership of companies and nonprofit organizations, IPSO’s work focuses on promoting the use of Internet protocol (IP) for smart objects and defining a smart-object framework for the IoT, with an emphasis on identity and privacy.
The OMA has delivered over 200 technical specifications since 2002, enabling interoperability across geographies and network technologies in the mobile wireless and IoT markets. With specifications spanning messaging, location, network and device APIs, push-to-talk, device management (DM) and more, the OMA DM specification alone has been deployed in over 2 billion devices.
As part of OMA SpecWorks, the organization will leverage its legacy to facilitate development of the next generation of wireless and IoT technology specifications.
“OMA has accomplished a great deal over the last 16 years, enabling the seamless data services that the industry enjoys today,” said Gary Jones, chairman of the Board, OMA. “By combining forces with IPSO to form OMA SpecWorks, we are able to extend our work to ensure a standardized approach to device management for the IoT that takes advantage of the many smart objects defined by IPSO.”
“With IP now in widespread use, it’s clear that IPSO achieved its goal,” said Jan Höller, former board member, IPSO Alliance and current board member, OMA SpecWorks. “Our work on the Smart Object Guidelines, which were implemented by OMA’s Lightweight M2M effort, first brought our organizations together. With a growing need to formalize the definitions, and with our work increasingly focused on issues relating to the IoT services layer, it quickly became clear that, together, IPSO and OMA could make strong technical progress to define technical specifications for the IoT.”
