Roland Hechwartner of Deutsche Telekom Group (DT) was appointed as chairperson for oneM2M’s Technical Plenary (TP). Here, he discusses his views on the Internet of Things (IoT) market and plans for oneM2M’s Technical Plenary (TP).
Would you begin by talking us through your work with oneM2M and your responsibilities at Deutsche Telekom?
RH: I’ve been involved with oneM2M since its first meeting in 2012 and I’m pleased that oneM2M members have elected me into the position of chair of oneM2M’s TP. This will build on my efforts with the program management committee to oversee and ensure progress in different working group activities.
I work within a DT Group business unit, dealing with international standardisation and intellectual property issues. I focus on standardisation at the application layer, above access technologies. Part of my role is to represent the interests of business development and product management teams within DT, including collaboration with our T-Mobile US colleagues.
What developments are you seeing in the IoT market and how does this affect your work within oneM2M?
RH: My views are based on what I hear from our customer facing teams and our experience of implementing IoT solutions. IoT is an integration business, beginning at the communications layer and building up to the applications layer. It relies on domain knowledge for different verticals.
There seems to be little re-use of solution elements and that is one reason why we started to look at standardisation. To begin with, we worked on communications and device-management. We wanted to modularise technology as a way of solving complex problems with smaller solutions.
There are a few key elements that are important to us and our developers. It starts with modularity, which gives you flexibility and leads to abstraction. The oneM2M standard applies the principle of abstraction to help developers build applications quickly and easily. Abstraction also allows developers to build applications with data from many different sources, or devices using many different communication technologies.
From a commercial perspective, we think that it will be important to have control over the services that deliver IoT solutions. When smartphones first came out, for example, there were lots of network signaling storms. That is why it is important to protect communications networks and keep them ‘clean’. We also need to manage profitability and deliver a reliable quality of service for application developers to deploy commercial services. This is something that the oneM2M technical specifications provide.
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