The smart home market is becoming increasingly mature, with customers embracing the technology that helps to connect devices and appliances within a home. In an effort to standardize smart home tech, Google, Apple, and Amazon last month to create a standard for devices.
Alongside the Zigbee Alliance, the goal of the group is to generate set protocols for devices from different manufacturers. While smart home tech can interconnect, most current implementations are limited to functioning across devices or platforms from the same brand.
Now, Samsung wants to remind people that a smart home standard already exists. Namely, the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), a union between Samsung, LG, and Haier.
“As a founding member of the OCF, over several years we have contributed much to deliver a standardized IoT solution to the market,” said Hyogun Lee, head of R&D, Visual Display Business, Samsung Electronics. “We anticipate that the OCF Universal Cloud Interface can resolve the current IoT market fragmentation. Thus building a unified IoT ecosystem.”
New UCI
Ahead of CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Samsung also revealed a new OCF Universal Cloud Interface (UCI). This is a developer service that will allow an open standard for different cloud manufacturers to leverage servers and communicate with each other.
Furthermore, the UCI will give manufacturers the tools to use development features through existing cloud applications.
So, now the smart home market has two standards competing against each other. Of course, this is nothing new during the early days of fledgling technology. What usually happens is a single standard is created that unifies the separate factions. Until then, it will be interesting to see how developers leverage both standards.
