Global Industry Standards
for Industrial IoT
An Industrial Internet Consortium White Paper
Claude Baudoin (OMG), Erin Bournival (Dell Technologies), Erich Clauer (SAP SE)

CONTENTS
1 Standards Development Organizations and Industry Consortia .......................................... 2
1.1
1.2

Standards Development Organizations ................................................................................ 2
Industry Consortia and Associations ..................................................................................... 3

2 Categories of Standards .................................................................................................... 4
3 Defining a Standards Strategy............................................................................................ 5
3.1
3.2
3.3
3.4
3.5
3.6
3.7

Intellectual Property (IP) vs. Standards................................................................................. 5
Rationale for Standards Adoption ........................................................................................ 8
Defining an Enterprise’s Standards Engagement Strategy ..................................................... 9
Forms of Standards Engagement ........................................................................................ 10
Drivers of a Strategy Choice ............................................................................................... 12Standards Adoption and the Product Lifecycle .................................................................... 12Standards Strategy for End Users ....................................................................................... 13

4 Executing the Standards Strategy .................................................................................... 13
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4

Assess the Product Portfolio .............................................................................................. 13
Implement a “Standards Watch” Function .......................................................................... 14
Define the Enterprise Standards Process ............................................................................ 19
Governance of Standards Activities .................................................................................... 20

5 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 21
Appendix A: Catalog of Standards Organizations .................................................................. 22
A.1
A.2

Standard Development Organizations ................................................................................ 22
Industry Consortia and Associations ................................................................................... 25

Authors and Legal Notice ..................................................................................................... 28

IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a rapidly expanding world of connected objects. As IIoT
systems proliferate, large amounts of data are consumed by machine learning algorithms andshared between partners, customers and others. IIoT is a technology environment in which
integration and interoperability are critical capabilities and the complexity of this environment
makes this difficult to achieve. Standards play a critical role in IIoT for five main reasons.
First, users and vendors cannot engineer a custom interface every time components or systems
need to interact. Standards can make this explosion of interfaces manageable; they are the lingua
franca for interoperability. For suppliers, this eliminates needless costs related to common
capabilities instead encouraging a focus on innovations that add value.
Second, Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) need to work together toachieve digital transformation of the enterprise, and this implies that OT can no longer deploy
isolated islands of automation, often comprising equipment from a few vendors, that do notconform to the protocols or data formats used elsewhere. To achieve the benefits of IIoT, thoseenvironments are now connected to enterprise systems and to each other through the internet,
and must therefore adhere to IT communication, security and data norms.
Third, customers are requiring standards compliance to avoid vendor lock-in. This creates acompetitive environment in which failure to support standards—international, regional,
industry-specific or function-specific—becomes a competitive disadvantage. Conversely, active
involvement projects a supplier’s thought leadership and increases customer confidence.
Fourth, regulatory agencies respond to the need for safety, security, and reporting by requiring
adherence to standards to make their monitoring and auditing work feasible.
Fifth, standards make employee skills portable across divisions and companies, which benefits
both the workforce and the companies that employ them by flattening the learning curve.
Organizations (such as IIC members) must respond to these imperatives by defining a standards
strategy and taking certain actions to execute it. The strategy could be simply to adopt andimplement standards as they emerge, but this limited engagement exposes the organization tosurprises. Participating in standards development organizations (SDOs) provides greater control
and allows an organization to anticipate the emergence of new standards. This requires acommitment at all levels and affects the organization, its processes, product design and budget.
This document examines the above in detail. It enumerates categories of standards and theorganizations that produce them. It establishes a vision and strategy to drive and leverage
standards. Also, it provides concrete guidance to the industry on execution and governance. In
short, this document fulfills Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC’s) goals of recommendingclasses of standards to the members, influencing standards development in the interest of ourcommunity, and demonstrating the value of standards by deploying them in our testbeds. We

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
encourage IIC members to apply this guidance in the development, adoption and use of IIoT
standards, enabling interoperability and system compatibility across the whole IIoT ecosystem.

1 STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS AND INDUSTRY CONSORTIAThis section describes the landscape of SDOs, industry consortia and associations involved in thedevelopment and adoption of standards. We have produced a catalog of such organizations
relevant to the IoT domain. This catalog appears in Appendix A. Note that any static catalog ofthis kind is liable to become obsolete quickly, as the list can be neither permanent nor exhaustive.
Figure 1-1 depicts the types of organizations, placing them along a horizontal axis corresponding
to the phases of a standards lifecycle.

Figure 1-1: Organization Types and Their Standards Lifecycles

1.1

STANDARDS DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONSStandards development organizations, by definition, develop and publish standards.
A standard is a repeatable, harmonized, agreed and documented way of doing something, and isgenerally established by an accredited institution.
Some SDOs have been established by national or international authorities and are recognized as
authoritative by them. The best-known example of those is probably the International
Organization for Standards (ISO). An extensive market of commercial companies that provide
training and compliance certification is usually associated with those standards.
SDOs tend have defined processes to work together. For example:

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
•

•

1.2

the adoption of an ISO standard requires reviews and votes by the SDOs of member
countries (e.g., American National Standards Institute [ANSI] for the United States,
Deutsches Institut für Normung [DIN] for Germany, Association Française deNormalisation [AFNOR] for France).
Object Management Group (OMG), the parent organization of the IIC, has an agreementwith ISO that allows an OMG adopted specification to be submitted to ISO as a “publicly
available specification” (PAS), often resulting in faster adoption as an ISO standard.

INDUSTRY CONSORTIA AND ASSOCIATIONS

A consortium (plural: consortia) “is an association of two or more individuals, companies,
organizations or governments (or any combination of these entities) with the objective ofparticipating in a common activity or pooling their resources for achieving a common goal.”1, 2
The IIC is such a consortium; so is its sister program, the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC). IIC
member companies have assembled to find solutions for the next industrial revolution, mainly
to identify and document the requirements for new technologies and new business models.
Many consortia, such as IIC, do not develop standards themselves; however, they often advocate
for them. When the need for a standard emerges out of the members’ collaboration, theconsortium will either identify an existing suitable standard, or will approach an SDO (with aprocess detailed in the next section) to encourage the development of a new standard. The
consortium members then become some of the subject matter experts who can help the SDO
define the requirements for the standard and test it once it is developed.
Consortia and industry associations can have a number of goals:
•
•

•
•

Some exist to share knowledge and provide networking opportunities to their members(e.g., periodic industry conferences).
Others are formed to influence policy–that is, to lobby governments to adopt or rejectpolicies and regulations to maximize the industry’s freedom of action (and profits). This is
usually done at the regional level, matching the structure of each government.
Some exist to facilitate the development of shared technology, which nowadays may takethe form of an open source project.
Finally, some consortia and associations create specifications that, without having theforce of a standard from an SDO or consortium, are voluntarily adopted by a plurality of
the association’s members, thus becoming a de facto standard.

1 https://www.irena.org/inspire/Standards/What-are-Standards
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consortium

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT

2 CATEGORIES OF STANDARDS
External standards comprise four main categories: open, closed, de jure and de facto.
An open standard:3•••

offers everyone the ability to participate in the development of a standard withoutbarriers to entry, either without cost or for a nominal administration fee,
offers everyone the ability to obtain the published version of a document, either without
cost or for a nominal fee andplaces no or few restrictions on their use.

Open standards are publicly available and have various rights-to-use associated with them, andthe authoring process used to develop open standards can vary widely. There is no single
definition for an “open standard” and interpretations vary with usage.
Open standards are generally developed in public settings with open membership, allowing allinterested stakeholders to participate under well-publicized bylaws, contribution policies anddeliverable licensing terms such as royalty free (RF) or Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory(RAND) terms. This approach is crafted to ensure vendor neutrality in open standards.
Closed standards can be developed and licensed by a handful of companies or even individuals.
Input from the broader user community is generally not accepted. Closed standards often haverestrictive licensing requirements in terms of permitted use (restricted to members only, forexample) or costs to obtain and use the standard.
A de jure standard is a technology, method or product that has been officially endorsed in law.
De jure, from medieval Latin, means from law. The term refers to legally protected or enforced
standards and to those that have been endorsed by an official standards organization, such as
ANSI or Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
Examples of de jure standards include:•••

American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII), the mostcommon format for English text files in computers and on the internet,
Small Computer System Interface (SCSI), a set of ANSI standard electronic interfaces thatallow personal computers to communicate with peripheral hardware, andTransmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) is the IETF-endorsed standard
communication language or protocol of the Internet.

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
De facto standards can be open standards, closed standards or deliverables from organizations
or individuals whose primary purpose is other than standards setting but who deliver
methodologies that equate to standards through either public acceptance or their licensing
agreements. De facto standards may or may not be called standards, but they can carry the same
weight as an official de jure standard. Some examples of de facto standards are:
•
•

•
•
•

methodology books by noted authors,
methodology documents from requirements organizations such as Plattform Industrie 4.0
and its RAMI 4.0 and the IIC and its Architecture, Connectivity, Industrial Analytics andSecurity Frameworks,
methodology documents delivered from open source projects such as those from theLinux Foundation or Eclipse Foundation, to support open source offerings,
required processes published by government agencies such as the United States Federal
Information Processing Standards andthe “.doc” and “.docx” formats for storing document content as specified by Microsoft.

3 DEFINING A STANDARDS STRATEGY
The purpose of this section is to allow enterprises to consider the range of strategies they might
adopt with respect to standards, based on a clear understanding of the advantages and risks
posed by those strategies with respect to their product roadmap and in particular theirintellectual property portfolio. We then review how the selected strategy can be implemented,
and in particular how a company may decide to contribute actively to standards efforts rather
than simply waiting for others to define them.
While the proposed standards strategy was primarily developed from the perspective of IIoT
technology or solution suppliers, as evidenced by the references to intellectual property
protection and product lifecycle, organizations that are buyers and users of IIoT will find thatmuch of this section applies to defining their own strategy as well. We conclude this section by
outlining the ways in which the strategy elements below can be adapted to the case of end users.

3.1

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY (IP) VS. STANDARDS

Adoption of standards over time: It is common for technologies, in their early years, to have atense relationship with standards:••

During the emerging phase, where technology development is led by research groups orby startups, standards are not seen as important or may even be considered harmful toinnovation.
During early commercialization, each supplier is keen to create and preserve an
advantage, and to attract customers and lock them in to their proprietary technology.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT••

When the technology matures, customers discover the need for integration,interoperability, and migration from one system to another. At the same time, suppliers
need to attract a broader clientele, and the need for standards emerges. At the end of
this phase, ad hoc standards are defined but are not yet well adopted.
When it becomes clear that more formality and governance are needed, the industry joinsforces with standards organizations and initiatives. Compliance with standards becomesa selling point and a procurement criterion.

Premature standardization could stifle innovation, but delayed standardization creates
unnecessary interchange, interoperability and integration difficulties. Today, many technology
suppliers are still in the first or second stage above. They have not recognized the need forstandards, or they are not yet convinced that adopting standards is in their best interest.
Commodity vs. innovation: An organization’s IoT products are typically architected into a numberof layers. The base layers are usually commodity components: hardware, operating systems or
programmable logic, or communication protocols. The top layers provide the product’s added
value and contain proprietary features that distinguish the product from its competitors. Someof the intermediate layers, which may be homegrown or open-source software, may provide
integration or interoperability with other products.
The choice of mature, standard-compliant components or interfaces for the lower andintermediate layers ensures that:••••components can be replaced by others that are “plug-and-play compatible” with theprevious ones,
market forces result in the best possible price for a given set of features,developers do not have to learn a different proprietary design as they move acrosscompanies and products andthe different parts of a system can readily interoperate or communicate with each other,for example by sending data in a readily recognized format.

At the upper end of the technology stack, a company that wants to command a premium in themarket is adding innovative features that give the product a competitive advantage. This can bein terms of advanced capabilities added through the incorporation of novel technologies such asmachine learning or blockchain, but also more commonly through better performance, size,
weight, user interface, programmability, etc., even aesthetics—aspects in which there is no
standard and a superior product will likely be preferred by customers.
A product standard strategy primarily consists of product marketing and engineering rules andbest practices to decide:•what parts of an IoT product should be commodity components,

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT••••

what parts should be the focus of value-adding, proprietary innovation (and why) andhow they should be protected (trade secret, patent or copyright),
what parts should adhere to established standards, because there is no added value increating or using a non-standard feature,
where the absence of a standard is an obstacle and the organizations should take anactive role in developing one andin that last case, which internally developed components can be contributed to therelevant community, and when they should be contributed to generate maximum value.
The standards matrix of Figure 3-1 describes the level ofcontrol a company may wish to maintain over their IP, thelevel of access the company may wish to grant topotential partners, standards bodies, or to the public, andhow this positioning may evolve over time.

The figure illustrates a typical progression (but not the
only possible one) in the development of a standard. It
begins with a proprietary technologythat originateswith a single company, which controls its design and
Figure 3-1: Standards Evolution Matrix
keeps it to itself. Over time, it is made available to awith Development Stages
community of partners of users, who gain access without
gaining control; it becomes a restricted, limited standard . As the degree of adoption increases,it then becomes advantageous to “donate” the technology to a consortium or international
standards organizations, which increases adoption and enlists more resources in thedevelopment of the standard .
Note that there is the possibility of a reverse path in this matrix: companies sometimes “adopt
and adapt” a standard, with the frequent consequence that the interoperability and portability
benefits of the standard are lost (we saw this frequently in past decades with supplier-specificversions of programming languages or relational database architectures).
Open Source Considerations: Open-source artifacts are developed in a collaborative publicmanner and shared within a community under a license that grants rights to use, study, change,and share the product.
The various kinds of open artifacts include:••

Open standards comprise written documents. A licensing fee or special terms may berequired to obtain and use them. Examples of open standards include standards issued
by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), ISO, DIN, and IEC.
Open source is code and data. It is typically available from a freely accessible repository(e.g., GitHub) or reference implementation and is usually licensed to end-users via a set
7

IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoTof open-source licenses. Open source gives you some measure of freedom to use the codeand data as you need to, often without a license fee.
o Examples of open source include Apache Spark, OpenJDK, Linux OS and LinuxEdge.
o Examples of open-source software licenses include the GNU Public License (GPL),
Apache, Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) and MIT license.
All are intellectual property of the contributor(s) and have contributing and use policies that havelegal requirements. In many cases, reference implementations of standards become open-source
projects in GitHub or elsewhere. Standards, just like open source, can ease development costs,
help realize the connected enterprise and increase the attractiveness of solutions to customers.

3.2

RATIONALE FOR STANDARDS ADOPTION

There are several key reasons why adopting existing standards may be preferable to the use oflegacy proprietary components:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

ensure interoperability with other suppliers’ products, which makes the company’s
products more appealing to prospective customers,align the entire portfolio of products (including across multiple product lines), thus
providing upselling opportunities,
create demand for new products once enough vendors can interoperate,
free up resources used to support non-standard components of a system,
leverage the work of the open-source community,
reduce the learning curve for new engineering and service personnel,
benefit from evolution of the standard, ensured by multiple cooperating organizations,convince customers that their investment in the company’s products is better protected
than if they buy a non-standards-based product from a competitor andproject an image of innovation and openness.

An example of how an IIC member company developed a technology and contributed it to thecommunity, allowing it to become a standard that others could leverage, is OData, a standard
protocol developed by Microsoft for creating and consuming RESTful Application Program
Interfaces (REST API).4 SAP (also member of IIC) and others joined Microsoft to further co-develop
the OData specification, and later submitted them to OASIS to become a standard. Thosecompanies successfully used an open technology strategy to maximize the value for themselves
and their customers, creating developer mindshare around the standard and enhancing
interoperability. OData was then implemented in both SAP and Microsoft products and deployedin open-source projects.

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Data_Protocol

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
The adoption of standards is a consequence of the convergence between IT and OT. The custom
hardware, software and network architectures of supervisory control and data acquisition(SCADA) systems are being replaced by off-the-shelf microprocessors, operating systems, andInternet protocols, which makes them cheaper and easier to integrate and manage. In turn, thisrequires adopting standard security and management protocols and practices, so that IT canensure the safe coexistence of those resources with the rest of the corporate network as well aswith cloud services. Over time, IT standards for distributed ledger technology and machinelearning will also run at the edge.

3.3

DEFINING AN ENTERPRISE’S STANDARDS ENGAGEMENT STRATEGY

Companies must decide what their level of involvement should be. In other words, there must
be a business and technology strategy.
In theory, a company can choose from a range of strategies. Some are better than others in agiven situation – it depends on the nature of the product, the market it serves, the maturity of
the industry, and other factors. The important thing is, a company must select one of thosestrategies with its eyes fully open.
First, there are three basic postures one finds in practice:•••

Ignore: Let the designers choose the best fit-for-purpose technology based on productrequirements. This may be appropriate when the product is going to have a short life
span, or when there is no foreseen competition or need for integration, or when time andcost constraints can only be met by adapting a legacy proprietary product, rather than anew one that follows standards. This posture can lead to surprises and accidents during
the development, sales or support phases.
Watch and adopt: Observe (passively) the evolution of the technology and make ad hoc
local decisions on what to use. This is appropriate when adherence to standards isnecessary to be competitive or brings cost savings by decreasing the engineering andsupport effort, but influencing the development of standards is not worth the cost. The
risk with this strategy is slipping into the complacency of the “ignore” strategy. The
company may be taken by surprise by the emergence of a new standard or the evolutionof an existing one, while a competitor with a more proactive engagement strategy is able
to comply with the new or updated standard more quickly.
Engage: The level of participation can vary, but at minimum it means becoming a memberof some alliances, consortia or standards committees, helping review the direction of thework, and informing the product design community inside the company of the roadmap
for future standards that may affect product plans.

If the company is even more ambitious, and has the appropriate experts on staff, it may take aleadership role, which includes actively communicating with other participants (including
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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
competitors) about what the overall interests of the industry are, and how the standards should
be shaped to achieve those benefits. This strategy can be costly: people who chair standards
committees can find it to be a full-time job. And while this is an opportunity to align a standard
with a company’s technology choices, rather than the other way around, such a move is likely to
be detected and resisted by competitors. This is the costliest posture, but it is the one that gives
an organization the greatest ability to be a market leader, forcing the competition to play catchup.
Other than the first option (ignore), each of the others require setting up the appropriate
mechanisms and roles. We will see this when we discuss the execution of the strategy.

3.4

FORMS OF STANDARDS ENGAGEMENTEngaging in standardization activities is part of an integrated strategic IP initiative. The
stakeholders include the legal and marketing departments and must be supported at the Chief
Executive Officer level to achieve one or more of the following goals:
•
•
•
•
•

improve the product quality and customer experience,meet customer expectations for interoperability,
reduce the development and support costs,
accelerate the learning curve of new employees anddemonstrate thought leadership.

Once these goals have been discussed, understood, and prioritized, one of the following common
approaches can be selected:•

Lead and migrate: This is a common strategy with companies (or small groups of allied
companies) that have developed a leading proprietary technology, such as a format a
protocol, that has become a de facto standard: others already find that they need to offersome compatibility or interoperability with that standard. Once this leading position isestablished, its authors have the option to submit the specification to the appropriate
SDO or consortium for standardization, resulting in wider industry adoption. Further
evolution of the standard then becomes a shared effort between many organizations andcan benefit from an open-source approach. Here are two examples of this approach thatare particularly relevant to the IIoT domain:o Microsoft’s proprietary Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), first released in 1990,
was extended to provide a bridge between Windows applications and process control
hardware, leading to OPC (OLE for Process Control) in 1996. The OPC Foundation wasthen created to maintain the standard. OPC was then adopted in various domains,resulted in its being renamed Open Platform Communications. It then underwent
significant changes to become OPC Unified Architecture (OPC-UA). Released in 2006.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT

•

•

•

•

•

o The Network Data Delivery Service (NDDS) was originally proposed by Stanford
University and Real-Time Innovations (RTI) in 1994. It led to a joint development by
RTI and Thales and the adoption of DDS (Data Distribution Service) by the OMG ten
years later. Today, DDS software is produced by several companies and there is an
OpenDDS open-source implementation.
Embrace and extend: In this strategy, a company adopts an existing standard, but extends
it within its own organization to meet its needs. The extensions can either be kept
internally, at the risk of limited interoperability with other products that follow theoriginal standard, or submitted back to the organization that owns the standard as input
for future versions, similar to how code is contributed to an open-source software
repository. Again, the decision to make the enhancements proprietary or to share themis strategic that involves more than technical staff.
Observe: In this strategy, a company participates in standards development efforts togather early information on what a standard will contain. This helps the engineering teamto start “designing to the standard” before it is finalized, and it demonstrates involvement
to customers, although no real contribution to the standard contents is intended.
Attendance at committee meetings and e-mail exchanges allow networking withpotential customers and partners, and intelligence gathering from competitors. The costis limited, but while no direct contribution is made, there is still a risk of either exposinginternal IP or other confidential information or infringing on someone else’s IP as a resultof this participation.
Neutralize: This defensive strategy comprises participating in a standards development
activity to prevent another company that dominates the market from imposing its
technology as a standard. The “neutralizing” company typically wants to avoid the broad
industry adoption of features they would not be able to support and does not want toappear as the loser in a battle of competing technologies. This means questioning, slowing
down, or opposing any decisions by a standards committee that are biased to give themarket leader an unfair advantage. This can be seen as obstructionist and requires muchcourage and diplomacy. The neutralize strategy can also be effective in conjunction withthe “align and converge” strategy below.
Pilot: Here, a company typically forms and leads an alliance that takes a newly defined
standard and creates prototypes or testbeds to ensure that the standard is
implementable. This is an important contribution, because the initial version of a standard
may contain unclear elements or even some errors or impossibilities. At the same time,
the participants end up with usable prototypes that can be evolved into actual products.
Adjustments to the standard are fed back to the responsible organization, while theprototypes may or may not be shared with the rest of the industry or kept within thealliance, depending on the commercialization and IP strategy decided at the beginning.
Align and converge: In this strategy, a company, typically a large and influential one (or asmall group of companies) identifies multiple competing standards that they must11

IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
support, with the result that engaging separately and simultaneously with each SDO–
including participating in meetings and contributing solutions–is too costly. The goal is toengage with the SDOs at the leadership level, garner consensus to align and combine theirrespective contributions, and find a single home for the converged standard.

3.5

DRIVERS OF A STRATEGY CHOICE

When devising a standards strategy, consider the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

strategic opportunity or threat,business problems and value scenarios,
corporate, technology and product strategy,
IP value and licensing approach,product maturity,
market share,
the current standards landscape,the known standards activities of competitors,
current customer or field service pain points (attributable to lack of standards),
the level of internal sponsorship available (because of the time and money involved in the
more proactive strategies) andtiming.

All these factors contribute to a cost/benefit ratio analysis that should drive the selection of astandards engagement strategy.

3.6

STANDARDS ADOPTION AND THE PRODUCT LIFECYCLE

New standards may emerge once a product is already in the market. In that case, a supplier needs
to decide whether to make its product compliant to maintain its appeal to the market and avoid
an attack by competitors. However, in general, relevant standards should be identified and madepart of the product’s design at the beginning of the product lifecycle. This can be done forengineering reasons (leverage open-source code, accelerate development) or marketing reasons(respond to customer demand, position interoperability as a competitive advantage).
Early engagement requires collaboration between the relevant standards experts withengineering stakeholders such as architects, product managers and developers. These
stakeholders can then evaluate the existing relevant standards landscape and shape theirproduct plans to align quickly with the industry–thus minimizing time-to-value and maximizing
customer adoption.
In summary, standards engagement provides value by exhibiting thought leadership, marketing
opportunities, early access to engaged customers and insight into emerging technologies. Sitting
on the sidelines and waiting for standards to “happen to you” is a risky option. It may seem the12

IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
cheaper strategy in the short term, but the price to be paid ultimately may be high. Instead, IIC
member companies are encouraged to take part in, and lead as appropriate, the development ofstandards to receive the benefits we outlined earlier.

3.7

STANDARDS STRATEGY FOR END USERS

End users of IIoT products or solutions can adapt the above strategy recommendations to theirown purpose. Most aspects are relevant to their situation.
Those end user organizations should consider the following:
•

•

•

•

•

Establish a company policy to mandate and use applicable standards. Standards are key
to vendor independence and reduced costs of integration. Applying IT standards to the
OT organization will also result in enhanced and more secure deployed systems.
Create and maintain a list of standards that suppliers should comply with. Thisrequirement should be implemented in collaboration with the sourcing department, so
it is included in all requests for proposals or quotations.
Establish and measure a metric of success. This may be in terms of the cost to integrate
non-standard products, training costs, the number of different protocols and interfaces“spoken” by the company’s system, the number of remaining non-compliant suppliers,
etc.
Assign a person or group to monitor the standards space. This function maintains thepolicy, the list of standards, and the metrics. It will also propose which standards
organizations to join to influence the development of those standards from an end
user’s perspective, balancing the interests of the suppliers.
Participate in industry consortium activities. In addition to learning from their peers,
members help drive the development of new standards by providing use cases andrequirements and by supporting testbeds for prototype technologies.

4 EXECUTING THE STANDARDS STRATEGY
Having defined its strategy among the options and using the considerations presented in Section
3, that strategy must be turned into a set of concrete actions. In this section, we detail both theprocess and organization changes to implement in order to make the strategy a reality.

4.1

ASSESS THE PRODUCT PORTFOLIO

The first step is to inventory the building blocks of the organization’s entire product portfolio.
Each of these building blocks is then categorized according to its relationship to standards. The
resulting inventory, which needs to be maintained as both the products and the standards willchange, contains for each entry the kinds of information shown in Table 4-1.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoTSpecification
Building Block
VersionSpecification
Source Type

Description
Unique name of a hardware, firmware, or software component, as typicallyfound in a bill of materials
Version number of the component
A reference to a document, or documents, describing the component
specifications
One of the following:•commodity supply (can be procured from multiple suppliers whose
products are interchangeable),• proprietary supply (procured from a specific supplier, notinterchangeable,• open source (software published by a community of developers) ordeveloped internally or by a contractor.
Name of the internal or external provider of this particular version of the
product

SourceStatusOne of the following:
•
•
•
•
•
•

Standards compliancelegacy–is no longer incorporated in new products,
no applicable standards exist,
not to be standardized (proprietary by intent),
standard-compliant,non-standard, no adequate standard is available, to be redesigned or
replaced by a standard-compliant component or
non-standard, no adequate standard is available, but development of
a new standard is recommended

List of standards (and their version) with which the component is compliant
Table 4-1: Organizational Building Block Inventory

Such a catalog of architectural building blocks constitutes one of the sources that can be used togenerate a separate catalog of standards in which the organization has a dependency or interest.

4.2

IMPLEMENT A “STANDARDS WATCH” FUNCTION

The above bottom-up approach (finding out what standards are used in existing products) is
insufficient, since by design it will not expose standards that none of the products currently
follow. Therefore, it needs to be complemented by a top-down approach, in which a technologywatch role actively researches what standards exist “out there” and should be followed, andwhich ones need help in coming to light.
Large companies should have a centralized team dedicated to supporting the business activities
related to standards, typically organized under the Office of the Chief Technical Officer. In someorganizations an IP lawyer is part of the central team. The most modern approach is that the legal
department supports the central team with issues like antitrust or intellectual property.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
In small companies, the standards watch function may be ensured by a single person or by a small
committee of people dedicated to this activity part-time.
This “standards watch” capability can use a variety of sources, such as:• papers and articles in professional journals,• presentations at conferences,• commercial literature from competitors,• feedback from marketing and sales,• direct discussions with customer personnel in technology roles,• attendance at open meetings of standards organizations and• participation in industry consortia (such as the IIC).
It helps to build a “shopping list” of potential areas of standardization because IIoT is a vast
domain, ranging from sensor communication to data analytics and machine learning, so there
are many standards to consider. To “divide to conquer,” one can examine the various parts of
IIC’s Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA) for useful guidance. Table 4-2 provides apotential (but not exhaustive) checklist of technology areas to consider.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Technology
Operating Systems

Cloud Deployment
Technologies

Data Management

Standards
In the past, SCADA systems were based on proprietary logic control, butmodern IoT systems use standard operating systems, such as Linux, and aresometimes stripped of unnecessary components to run in resourceconstrained environments.
Emerging standards for cloud interoperability and orchestration will play animportant role in avoiding vendor lock-in. For example, the Linux Foundation
offers the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and the Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF) and hosts the Container Network Interface (CNI) project.
The Kubernetes project aims at providing portability and orchestration ofworkloads in multi-cloud environments.
While standards for relational data management, such as Structured Query
Language (SQL), have been in existence for decades, data analytics andmachine learning require new structures better suited to those jobs.
Ontologies and knowledge graphs are the key forms of knowledge
representation that form the foundation for data understanding, not justdata storage and retrieval. Standards such as RDF (Resource Description
Framework), OWL (Web Ontology Language) or SPARQL–the query language
for RDF databases--are increasingly important.
Based on these languages, several initiatives are creating standards forsemantic building blocks in the specific context of various industries. The
general methodology for the creation of business vocabularies can be found,in particular, in ISO 15000-5:2014 (https://www.iso.org/standard/61433.html).
More generally, the conceptual modeling of all the information acquired andprocessed by an IoT system is a fundamental necessary step, and the Unified
Modeling Language (UML) is the unchallenged standard to perform thisactivity.
Data quality is essential to being able to make proper decisions that a system
will execute with minimal “human in the loop” involvement. In this respect,
the work of ISO TC 184/SC 4 on industrial data as well as the ISO 8000 data
quality standards are likely to be critical. SC 4 includes working groups
responsible for product characteristics, oil/gas/process/power industries,
industrial data quality and digital manufacturing.

Systems Modeling Language (SysML) is based on UML, is widely supported by
Systems Modeling and vendor tools and addresses much more than the data model. A new version,
Interoperability
SysML v2, under development in 2020-21, will add many important modelingextensions.
Asset-intensive systems (power plants, refineries, oil platforms, ships…)
present their own challenges. Their cost mandates a long operational life,
which means that original designs may only be documented on paper, andthe history of the system as-designed, as-built and as-maintained may havebeen lost. The work of the MIMOSA industry association on the Open
Industrial Interoperability Ecosystem (OOIE), tightly related to the ISO 15926
standard, is one noteworthy standard approach.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Technology

Standards

Information Exchange

Reliable and secure real-time data communication is now covered by multiplecompeting standards. This is a rich field, with many interoperable
implementations, and choosing between these protocols based on specificsystem requirements can be a challenge. This reinforces the need for theactive “standards watch” function and potentially for involvement in thecorresponding organizations.
Some of the best-known standards for communication between the various
components of an IoT system are MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry
Transport), developed by OASIS and adopted as ISO/International
Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) 20922; OPC/UA (Open Platform
Communications Unified Architecture), developed by the OPC Foundationand standardized as IEC 62541; DDS, an OMG standard.
The format of the information that flows from sensors to systems is also theobject of standardization efforts. IIC provided the motivation for OMG todevelop the SENSR (Simple Electronic Notation for Sensor Reporting)standard, adopted in 2019.

Security

Many of the same approaches and standards in the area of non-IoT
system security can also be used in IoT system security.
The authentication of devices and the encryption of data traffic,
especially for sensors located “in the field” and outside of physicallyprotected areas, can be handled using Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)
based on IETF Request for Comments (RFCs) 2510 and 2511. For accessto cloud resources, the recommendations of the Cloud Security
Alliance (CSA) are key.
The security extensions of information exchange protocols (forexample, DDS-Security) must also be considered.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Technology

Standards

Artificial Intelligence andMachine Learning

AI/ML is an area in which there are few published standards yet (andno real adoption), but various organizations are working to develop
them. ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 42, the ISO subcommittee on AI, has mostly
focused on a big data reference model, but started in 2020 to focus on
AI trustworthiness. The OMG initiated an Artificial Intelligence Platform
Task Force at the end of 2019 to remedy this. For OMG, the goal of AI
standards is to “reduce the friction” in:•••metadata for training data sets,
a standard format for the exchange of classifier data,neural network sensitivity metrics (how much can a smallchange in one input cause a major change to a
recommendation) and• the way in which a machine learning algorithm can provide ahuman-readable explanation of how it reached its decision.
Standards for “ethical AI” are also being considered by someorganizations, and the American Council for Technology and Industry
Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) has developed a scorecard to address this.
It is important for such standards not to restrict the creativity andgeneration of novel intellectual property by companies that develop AI
solutions.
Table 4-2: Checklist of Technology Areas and Related Standards

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Both the standards watch capability and the study of existing product architectures lead to a
standards inventory, which contains entries a shown in Table 4-2:
Standards Inventory
Standard nameVersionResponsible organization
Purpose and benefit
Used inName of the standard
Version of the standard
Source of the standard (IEEE, ISO, OMG, Open Group, etc.)
Rationale to adhere to this standard
List, inverted from the previous table, of the products that adhere to thisstandard (if any)

Adoption level

One of the following:
•
•
•
•
•

retired (superseded, or found to be detrimental; must not be
used anymore),obsolescent (must not be used in new products),
active (is currently recommended whenever possible),
emergent (to be introduced selectively when advantageous) ordesirable (does not exist but would bring benefits).

Table 4-2: Standards Inventory

Finally, the (typically short) list of “desirable” standards can be filtered into:• those that are mature and require no particular attention,• those that need to be watched because they keep evolving, and the designers need tobe made aware when the market requires an upgrade to a newer version or• those few which the company should take an active role in creating.

4.3

DEFINE THE ENTERPRISE STANDARDS PROCESSThe flow of requirements and contributions between the parties involved can be represented by
the graph in Figure 4-3, in which the “north and east” parts (blue ovals and arrows) represent theorganizations and flows that exist in organizations regardless of whether they have formalized astandards watch function, while the “south, west and center” parts (brown ovals and arrows)
represent the additional groups and interactions that result from adding this function.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT

Figure 4-3: Flow of Standards Requirements and Contributions
Note: “Standard Orgs.” In the diagram refers to both formal standards organizations and to consortia;
their products, shown here as “standards,” include formal standards as well as other specifications.

Organizations that choose to follow the strategy of adopting or contributing to standards can use
the above diagram to verify that their product groups, supply chain department and thestandard-watch group implement all the necessary collaborations to execute that strategy.
We specifically included the supply chain department to highlight the role it can play in adding
standards compliance to the requirements expressed in Request for Proposals (RFPs), and inscreening received bids for adherence to such requirements. It just becomes an important factor
in the implementation of the strategy.

4.4

GOVERNANCE OF STANDARDS ACTIVITIESAs the diagram above shows, a proactive standards strategy will result in multiple efforts
throughout the company to watch, disseminate, document, adopt, adapt, and influence
standards. To avoid duplication of efforts (or worse, conflicting efforts), certain coordination andgovernance mechanisms must be put in place.
Tracking: A supplier may participate in dozens of standards-related activities. It is important thata company know which SDOs it has joined, under which membership agreements, and over whattime period. Tracking the company’s participation ensures that the company can renew its
participation in a timely manner, replace a delegate who has left the company, and disengage if
the risk of sharing information with competitors exceeds the advantage to be gained.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
IP protection: Failure to comply with participation agreements, including the failure to disclose
certain intellectual property rights (IPR) when contributing technology to a standard, result in avariety of legal risks. Mature organizations participating in standards have procedures in-place tovet the IP aspect of each participation and do so with underlying IP strategies. Development andimplementation of a sound policy is essential and should be executed by the legal department. It
is equally important to identify those employees who have participated and made contributions
that may create encumbrances on intellectual property rights and may give rise to additional IP
disclosure obligations. IP commitments and encumbrances should be tracked to ensure thatcommercial agreements and transactions account for these encumbrances.
Community of practice: Participants engaged in SDO activities are often dispersed throughout thecompany (at least in a large organization) and work in specific product or business groups.
Building a community of practice of these participants helps them share best practices and gives
them a sense of identity. It also allows direct cross-pollination of efforts since the various
standards areas often overlap (for example, information exchange and security).
Education and training: Both business and legal resources should be allocated to educate thepersonnel participating in SDOs in both the business strategy of the company and the intricacies
of IP protection.5 Many larger companies have developed training programs to teach thecompany’s engagement and approval policies or antitrust compliance. In some cases, advisory
resources may be needed to participate in SDO governing bodies such as steering committees orlegal working groups to execute effectively on the company’s standards’ strategy since they havegreater visibility of the overall strategy. Business should drive the engagements.
Policy and outreach: Some organizations allocate business, technical and legal resources to workwith the government and community affairs offices. Doing so helps ensure that legislators are
informed about the impact of their efforts, and that public policy does not duplicate or contradict
industry standards efforts or become unduly burdensome.

5 CONCLUSION
We have demonstrated the business case and established strategies for adopting existing
standards and participating in standards development. To realize these benefits, we recommendthat you:••review the use of standards in your own organization, and discuss with leadership the
adoption of strategies recommended in this document,
provide feedback on your own initiatives and experiences in the use and development ofstandards to the IIC Standards Task Group,

5 Some companies hire standards professionals to represent their interests in SDOs.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT•••

volunteer as a Liaison Officer between the standards development organizations you
engage with and the IIC,
suggest to the Standards Task Group new liaison opportunities with the standards
development organizations you participate in andparticipate in the evolution of this document.

APPENDIX A: CATALOG OF STANDARDS ORGANIZATIONSThis Appendix completes Section 2 of the paper by providing an example list of SDOs, industry
consortia and associations that play a role in the definition and adoption of standards relevantto the Industrial Internet.

A.1

STANDARD DEVELOPMENT ORGANIZATIONS

Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus

AFNOR

Association Française deNormalisation (FrenchStandards Association)www.afnor.fr

As France’s standardization coordinator, AFNOR
has a clear-cut goal: contribute to thedissemination of best practices and effective
solutions for the benefit of all. To this end AFNOR
Standardization informs and guides all those who,
through their involvement in the development ofvoluntary standards, wish to enable developmentof projects, activities and sectors under optimal
conditions and thereby contribute to building the
economy and society of tomorrow.

BSI

British Standards Institute

DIN

Deutsches Institut für Normung
e.V. (German Institute forStandardization)www.din.de/en

The German national organization forstandardization and is the German ISO member
body. DIN is a German Registered Association (e.V.)
headquartered in Berlin. There are currently
around 30,000 DIN Standards, covering nearly
every field of technology.

DKE

German ElectrotechnicalStandards Board
www.dke.de/en

The expertise centre for electrotechnicalstandardization in Germany.

ECLASSECLASS
www.eclass.eu/en

ECLASS has established itself internationally as the
only ISO/IEC-compliant industry standard and isthus the worldwide reference-data standard for theclassification and unambiguous description of
products and services.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus

ETSI

European Telecommunications
Standards Institutewww.etsi.org

ETSI produces globally-applicable standards for
Information and Communications Technologies(ICT), including fixed, mobile, radio, converged,
broadcast and internet technologies. Examples ofstandards are Global System for Mobile
Communications (GSM™), Digital Enhanced
Cordless Telecommunications (DECT™), Smart
Cards and more.

IEC

International ElectrotechnicalCommissionwww.iec.ch

A non-profit international standards organizationthat prepares and publishes international standards
for a vast range of technologies.

IEEE

Institute of Electrical andElectronics Engineers
www.ieee.org

IEEE and its members inspire a global community toinnovate for a better tomorrow through its morethan 423,000 members in over 160 countries, andits highly cited publications, conferences,
technology standards, and professional andeducational activities. IEEE is the trusted “voice” forengineering, computing, and technology
information around the globe.

IETF

Internet Engineering Task
Forcewww.ietf.org

The premier internet standards body, developing
open standards through open processes. It is alarge open international community of network
designers, operators, vendors, and researchers
concerned with the evolution of the internetarchitecture and the smooth operation of theinternet.

ISA

International Society ofAutomationwww.isa.org

A non-profit professional association founded in1945 to create a better world through automation.
ISA advances technical competence by connecting
the automation community to achieve operational
excellence.

ISO

International Organization forStandardizationwww.iso.org

An independent, non-governmental internationalorganization with a membership of 164 national
standards bodies. ISO has published 22668
International Standards and related documents,
covering almost every industry, from technology, tofood safety, to agriculture and healthcare.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus

ITU

International
Telecommunication Union
www.itu.in

The United Nations specialized agency for
information and communication technologies(ICTs). Founded in 1865 to facilitate international
connectivity in communications networks, we
allocate global radio spectrum and satellite orbits,
develop the technical standards that ensure
networks and technologies seamlesslyinterconnect, and strive to improve access to ICTs
to underserved communities worldwide. Every time
you make a phonecall via the mobile, access theinternet or send an email, you are benefiting fromthe work of ITU.

OASIS

Organization for the
Advancement of Structure
Information Standards
www.oasis-open.org

The goal of OASIS is to promote the adoption of
product-independent standards for information
formats such as Standard Generalized Markup
Language (SGML), Extensible Markup Language(XML) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
Currently, OASIS is working on the development,
convergence, and adoption of standards forsecurity, IoT, energy, content technologies,
emergency management and other areas. They are
helping develop Advanced Message Queuing
Protocol (AMQP) and Message Queuing Telemetry
Transport (MQTT), which are directly related to IoTadvancements.

OMG

Object Management Groupwww.omg.org

The mission of OMG is to develop technology
standards that provide real-world value forthousands of vertical industries. OMG is dedicatedto bringing together its international membershipof end-users, vendors, government agencies,
universities and research institutions to develop
and revise these standards as technologies change
throughout the years.

oneM2M

oneM2M
www.onem2m.org

The leading international standardization body formachine-to-machine (M2M) communication and
IoT. It was established through an alliance ofstandards organizations to develop a single
horizontal platform for the exchange and sharing ofdata among all applications. oneM2M is providing
an interworking framework and enabling re-use ofwhat is already available as much as possible.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus

OPC

OPC Foundationwww.opcfoundation.org

The goal of OPC Foundation is to createtechnologies that allow information to be easily
and securely exchanged between diverse platforms
from multiple vendors and to allow seamlessintegration of those platforms (without softwaredevelopment) primarily for the purpose ofIndustrial Automation (I4.0).
OPC provides products that include Software(servers, clients, toolkits) and Services from OPC
members. Apart from these products and services,
OPC provide certification for interoperability
among various OPC products from different
vendors. The OPC-UA technology is standardized at
IEC 62541.

W3C

Word Wide Web Consortium
www.w3.org

An international community that develops open
Web standards to ensure the long-term growth of
the Web.

A.2

INDUSTRY CONSORTIA AND ASSOCIATIONS

Abbreviation Full Name & Website
AII

Focus

China Alliance of Industrial
Internet

The industrial internet is a major component in
the strategy for the “China Manufacturing 2025”
and “Internet + Collaborative Manufacturing”
initiatives as a key instrument in thetransformation and upgrading of advanced
manufacturing industry in China and abroad.

http://en.aii-alliance.org/

America
Makes

America Makes
www.americamakes.us

The U.S. leading and collaborative partner in
additive manufacturing and 3D printing
technology research, discovery, creation, andinnovation. Structured as a public-private
partnership, we innovate and accelerate
AM/3DP to increase our nation’s global
manufacturing competitiveness.

BITKOM

Bundesverband
Informationswirtschaft,
Telekommunikation und neue
Medien e. V.
www.bitkom.org

Bitkom is Germany’s digital association.
Founded 1999 in Berlin, they represent morethan 2,600 companies of the digital economy. Its
membership spans more than 1,000 SMEs, over
500 startups and virtually all global players.
Bitkom advocates the digitisation of theeconomy, the society and public administration.

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus

CESMII

Clean Energy Smart
Manufacturing Innovation
Institutewww.cesmii.org

Smart Manufacturing (SM) enables all
information about the manufacturing process to
be available when it is needed, where it isneeded, and in the form it is needed across theentire manufacturing value-chain to powersmart decisions. Islands of efficiency become
interoperable, networked, and resilient
solutions to drive transformational
manufacturing enterprise performance for any
size, level of technical sophistication, or
resource availability at lower cost.

Energistics

https://www.energistics.org/

Energistics (formerly the Petroleum Open
Standards Consortium [POSC]) provides theglobal upstream oil and gas industry with anopen consortium to define, develop andmaintain data standards. Energistics is dedicatedto informing, educating and supporting all
stakeholders to ensure a rapid and effective
adoption of the standards in the pursuit ofinteroperability, efficiency and data integrity.

EUCEP

European Circular Economy
A joint initiative by the European Commission
and the European Economic and Social
Stakeholder Platform
www.circulareconomy.europa.eu/ Committee
platform/

IIC

Industrial Internet Consortium
www.iiconsortium.org

Define IoT standards requirements, develop
reference architectures and frameworks
necessary for interoperability. Create newindustry use cases and run testbeds; build an
ecosystem. Define and influence theinternational development standards process
for internet and industrial systems

NAMUR

User of Automation Technology
in Process Industries
www.namur.net/en

NAMUR, the "Association of Automation
Technology in Process Industries", is aninternational association of user companies(established in 1949) and represents theirinterests concerning automation technology.
NAMUR has over 150 member companies.
Added value through automation engineering
drives all NAMUR member company activities.

OGC

Open Geospatial Consortium

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is aninternational consortium of morethan 500 businesses, government agencies,

www.ogc.org

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IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus
research organizations, and universities driven
to make geospatial (location) information andservices FAIR - Findable, Accessible,
Interoperable, and Reusable.

OSGi

Open Services Gateway initiative
Alliance.
www.osgi.org

The OSGi specification describes a modular
system and a service platform for the Java
programming language that implements acomplete and dynamic component model.
The alliance is in the process of starting an IoTworkstream.

PI4.0

Plattform Industrie 4.0
www.plattform-i40.de

The Plattform Industrie 4.0 is led by the German
Government. The associations BITKOM, VDMA
and ZVEI support the efforts. The Learning
Networks Industry complements the Plattform
to run testbeds and the Standardization Council
works to get the requirements standardized.

PLS

Plattform Lernende Systeme(Platform for Learning Systems)
www.plattform-lernendesysteme.de

Launched by the German Federal Ministry of
Education and Research (BMBF) in 2017 at thesuggestion of The German Academy of Scienceand Engineering (acatech) to design self-learning
systems for the benefit of society. The members
are organized into Working Groups and a
Steering Committee that consolidates thecurrent state of knowledge about self-learning
systems and artificial intelligence. They pointout developments in industry and society,analyze the skills that will be needed in the
future and use application scenarios todemonstrate the benefit of self-learning
systems. A managing office at acatech
coordinates the work.

VDE

Verband der Elektrotechnik,
Elektronik undInformationstechnik (Association
for Electrical, Electronic andInformation Technologies)
www.vde.com/en

VDE develops ideals for a future emerging here
and now—in an extraordinary network of
research, science, industry, safety andeducation.

VDI

Verein Deutscher Ingenieure(Association of German
Engineers)

Engineers need a strong network that supports,
advances and represents them in their work.
That is exactly the task that we in VDI–The
Association of German Engineers–take on. We
have been reliably supporting engineers forwww.vdi.de27

IIC Global Industry Standards for Industrial IoT
Abbreviation Full Name & Website

Focus
more than 160 years. We provide them with aprofessional base and maintain a lively network
at regional, national and international Levels.

VDMA

Verband Deutscher Maschinenund Anlagenbau e.V. (Association
for Mechanical Engineering
Industry)

VDMA represents more than 3,200 member
companies in the SME-dominated mechanicaland systems engineering industry in Germany
and Europe.

www.vdma.org
ZVEI

Zentralverband Elektrotechnikund Elektronikindustrie e.V.
(German Electrical and Electronic
Manufacturers' Association)www.zvei.org

ZVEI is one of the most important industrial
associations in Germany. It represents theinterests of a high-tech sector with a very wideand extremely dynamic product portfolio. ZVEI
is committed to the common interests of theelectrical industry in Germany and at theinternational level. This commitment is
supported by the involvement of around 160
employees in the main office and about 5,000
employees of the member companies in anhonorary capacity.

AUTHORS AND LEGAL NOTICEThis document is a work product of the Industrial Internet Consortium Standards Task Group, cochaired by Erin Bournival (Dell Technologies), Erich Clauer (SAP), and Yaling Zhou (Huawei).
Authors: The following persons contributed substantial written content to this document: Claude
Baudoin (OMG), Erin Bournival (Dell Technologies), Erich Clauer (SAP SE).
Editor: Sven Toothman (SAP SE).
Technical Editor: Stephen Mellor (IIC staff) oversaw the process of organizing the contributionsof the above authors and editors into an integrated document.

Copyright© 2021 Industrial Internet Consortium, a program of Object Management Group, Inc.
(“OMG”).
All copying, distribution and use are subject to the limited License, Permission, Disclaimer andother terms stated in the Industrial Internet Consortium Use of Information: Terms, Conditions &Notices. If you do not accept these Terms, you are not permitted to use the document.

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