Telefónica I+D has today announced a new partnership with the Korean operator KT Corporation to strengthen the FIWARE platform as the de facto standard for the development of solutions and services that connect to the Internet of Things (IoT).
David del Val, CEO of Telefónica I+D pointed out that "the ultimate goal of this alliance is to consolidate FIWARE as the point of reference when it comes to defining an architecture and a set of APIs to facilitate the development of interoperable applications that connect to the Internet of Things. Telefónica I+D is fully confident that FIWARE will become the de facto standard for the entire industry in the near future".
To this end, both companies will collaborate in supporting the activities of the free software community that will be created with the goal of maintaining and evolving the API specs (programming interfaces) of the FIWARE platform. This community will also maintain and evolve open-source guidelines for the implementation of specs that can be used as a guide by the rest of the industry, thereby encouraging the emergence of alternative platform operators.
In addition, Telefónica I+D and KT will work together to develop models of data standards for connected objects and devices in the future. These models will, combined with FIWARE APIs, facilitate portability and interoperability of the solutions deployed on IoT platforms supported by different carriers.
As part of the Mobile World Congress, both companies have already borne the first fruits of this collaboration, in the form of the IDE project (IoT Data Ecosystem), launched with the GSMA. This initiative is geared towards adopting standards that help the creation of a contextual data exchange ecosystem that includes information from connected devices. With this step, KT and Telefónica are taking the initiative in helping to create business opportunities for manufacturers of Internet of Things devices, network and platform providers that will facilitate data exchange to and from devices, as well as solutions integrators and application developers.