Five IT and equipment companies have formed a group to drive standards for the so-called Internet of Things, a network that would feed data back and forth between computers and all kinds of industrial gear.

AT&T, Cisco Systems, General Electric, IBM and Intel announced the Industrial Internet Consortium Thursday, vowing to help make equipment such as sensors, valves and motors talk to IT systems that can control the gear and analyze data from it. The IIC won't set standards but will work with existing standards bodies on ground rules for making products from all vendors work together, the group said.

The combination of IT and OT (operational technology) can make a wide range of industries more efficient and let companies tap into vast amounts of data generated by equipment in the field, IoT proponents say. Among other things, such streams of data can help to diagnose problems and show trends over time. But to make this a reality on a large scale, different types of industrial and IT gear will need to work together so enterprises can mix vendors and build systems more easily, the IIC members said.

"We're talking about a very heterogeneous world across multiple industry segments," said Ron Ambrosio, distinguished engineer and CTO in IBM's Smarter Energy Research division, on a conference call Thursday morning. Sectors where IoT can be used include transportation, manufacturing, oil and mining, and energy grids.

"Up until this point, many of the deployments in the Internet of Things have happened in a very siloed manner, and this has somewhat, as an industry, held us back," said Ton Steenman, vice president of the IoT Solutions Group at Intel.

Instead of setting standards itself, the IIC plans to define best practices and requirements for standards, as well as producing reference architectures and case studies. It will also create new industry test beds as well as using existing ones.

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