Frank den Hartog, Senior Innovator, TNO; TWG Chairman, HGI, HGI/TNO, answers the following questions for the 2015 CONNECTIONS Europe Conference, the annual executive IoT conference hosted by Parks Associates in Amsterdam:

What challenges does Europe face with rolling out new smart home and connected entertainment services?

The current way of working by the industry is device-oriented and to provide smart home verticals. These services are not scalable and for the end user every additional vertical provides less added value. The challenge for Europe is to break this circle and to provide open source cross-sector integration tools (“abstraction layer”) to enable a truly scalable and interoperable smart home. This will leverage the European software industry and provide better competition with the oversees hardware manufacturers.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing your company in the next 12 months? 

HGI is a leading organization with regard to defining and creating such an abstraction layer, but cannot do that without the involvement of many other industry organizations, such as OneM2M, Allseen Alliance, and Echonet.

How will companies leverage the growth in the market in the next 12 months? What is the impact of the Internet Giants (Google, Amazon) getting involved in the market?

See above. Regarding the smart home, the impact of Google and Amazon has been rather limited so far. This will change when they decide to leave the point-solution vertical architectures of the past, and focus on open source solutions and creating true interoperability. Creating interoperability has traditionally been a specialty of the European industry.

Frank will be speaking on the panel "Seamless Interoperability: Driving Mass-Market Adoption" on 11 November at 13:45. For more information on the sessions and speakers at this year's event, visit www.connectionseurope.com.

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