US consortium forms to research Industrial Internet

A group of up to ten US companies, included AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM, and Intel, have teamed up with US government representatives to form an Industrial Internet consortium. The group's goal is to be up and running with an initial draft of its framework and a test bed for it within a year. The framework will use open industry standards and would serve a broad range of market sectors from automotive and manufacturing to healthcare and military applications. Full details at EE Times.

"The industrial and Internet revolutions are converging, and we believe the US could gain a competitive advantage with new products and services if we can exploit this convergence," said S. Shyam Sunder, a director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who is helping organize the consortium.

The companies approached the government with the idea for the consortium in December. Their request dovetailed with an emerging NIST program on cyber-physical systems that had been the subject of a series of high-level meetings NIST hosted with technical and business industry leaders last year.