The meeting was very successful in bringing together the communities. The discussions that ensued highlighted that although work on platforms is essential and considerable progress has been made in this area with flagship platforms (e.g. CRYSTAL, FIWARE),
the real world is more complex and requires a mixture of platforms tailored to applications. Rather than pursuing one platform that tries to meet all requirements there is a need for a variety of platforms driven by use cases. To gain industrial acceptance these need to be demonstrated considering real world requirements preferably as large scale “industrial strength” pilots. For future industrial exploitation in products and services there is a need to extract the core elements and interfaces from these platforms and not only than promoting adoption of platforms per se.
Security and data protection were seen as key barriers and also enablers to adoption. There is a need for security at an overarching level. This can either be driven by European players alone with the intention of gaining a commercial advantage or could be done in conjunction with the wider community in the US and Asia with the aim of influencing future standards. Here the European Commission can channel concerns from European players into the ongoing legislative process. Standardisation and prenormative activities are also important and different application specific standards are foreseen on a needs basis. Although this may lead to many IoT standards, the pursuit of standards is seen as a key element in avoiding silos being created across sectors and regions.
Finally, something that was highlighted strongly by the meeting is that there is currently a lack of business models for IoT. New business models will be driven by the market but the European Commission can provide a framework/forum for companies to network and develop new ideas. The next two years are seen as a critical phase for identifying business models which will allow Europe to bring commercial IoT products and services to market.
For further info, please check the Workshop Report.