London (11 May 2017): The largest trade organization serving the Internet of Things sector, the IoT M2M Council, has announced that it will develop RFP documents that can be used as templates to procure IoT software. The group intends to bring together its leadership committee, comprised of senior IoT buyers from Fortune 500s, with solutions providers to develop the documents in an open-source process, hosted by a wiki website. Once finished, the IMC plans to validate participating software vendors as being compliant, and to integrate lists of these solutions providers into the published RFPs.

“There’s been an explosion in the number of IoT software vendors, and there are no clear-cut categories for these platforms. A plurality of IMC Adopter Members says that they are looking to buy software, and need hands-on procurement tools. The systems are complicated, and we feel that we can provide real utility with these reference materials,” says Joel Young, IMC Chairman and CTO of IoT solutions provider Digi International. The RFPs will address different vertical-market applications, and will be broken into functional sections, such as connectivity management, device management, and data analytics.

The IMC plans to promote the finished RFPs among its 20,000 thousand rank-and-file members – mostly enterprise users and OEMs – as well as outside of its membership. The IMC has posted outline documents on its wiki, and information is also available at its website. Development of final documents is expected to take place over the next month, with validation of participating vendors to begin shortly thereafter. Publication of the final RFPs, complete with integrated lists of validated vendors, is expected in September.

“The concept is to bring buyers and sellers of IoT solutions together with a common language and expectations. We feel that software platforms are a great place to start, given the state of the market, but we don’t intend to stop there. We expect to begin work on RFP sets for connectivity services in the fall, followed quickly by various categories of hardware, integration services, and more,” says Young.

About the IoT M2M Council

The IMC is the largest trade group dedicated to the global IoT/M2M sector – with over 28,000 IoT adopters as members. Board companies include 1NCE, 2J Antennas, A1 Digital, Aeris, Airgain, Blues, Digi International, eSAT Global, Eseye, Fibocom, floLIVE, Friendly Technologies, Giesecke+Devrient, Globalstar, Ground Control, Gurtam, Hologram, iBasis, Ignion, IoT Launch, Keyfactor, KORE, KYOCERA AVX, Losant, MultiTech, OQ Technology, Pelion, Printed Energy, Quectel, Somos, Tata Communications, Telit Cinterion, and Vodafone. Visit www.iotm2mcouncil.org