On 2 March 2016, the German 'Plattform Industrie 4.0' and the 'Industrial Internet Consortium' held a press conference to announce closer cooperation between the two organizations.

The announcement was preceded by a meeting of representatives from both initiatives in Zurich in November last year. Representatives from Bosch, Cisco, IIC, Pepperl+Fuchs, SAP, Siemens, ThingsWise and the Steinbeis Institute met on "neutral" Swiss soil to explore whether there could be a basis for closer cooperation between the platform and the IIC.

Over the past 18 months, there have been repeated discussions about a competitive relationship between the two initiatives. Discussions that were less technically sound and more emotional. On the other hand, there are also more and more companies that are active in both initiatives. "Reducing the market discussion and understanding the technical content of the other organization became more and more important," says the summary of this conversation.

Comparison of the reference architectures

The Zurich discussion also focused on the reference architectures of the two initiatives - RAMI 4.0 and IIRA. The experts compared which components of the architectures are merely referred to using different vocabulary, which components are actually the same and which are significantly different. The experts determined that a merger of the two architectures would be both impractical and undesirable, as the architectures have different objectives: Industry 4.0 with RAMI focuses on the factory environment; the IIC with IIRA, on the other hand, encompasses the overall topic of the Internet of Things across individual application areas.

As the two approaches do not compete directly with each other, but rather complement each other, the experts want to intensify cooperation between the initiatives. In other words, they want to work together on the necessary standardization and also use joint test environments. - A joint roadmap should already exist for these tasks.