The Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) will acquire the assets of fellow standards effort UPnP Forum in an effort to consolidate standards efforts for IoT.

UPnP worked in the smart home standards space and will now sit under OIC as a work group.

“Gartner predicts that there will be 21 billion IoT-connected devices in use by 2020; by that time, there must be an accepted common standard in place to ensure these devices are able to communicate and operate in the capacity they were designed for,” OIC said in a statement.

“This asset transfer with UPnP Forum is the OIC’s latest step in ensuring interoperability.”

OIC said it would “offer legacy UPnP certification for a fee to companies who choose not to join OIC.”

The consolidation was welcomed by VDC Research’s Christopher Rommel, who noted the need to overcome the myriad of IoT standards vying for industry acceptance.

“Fragmentation amongst Internet of Things protocols/standard bodies has been one of the hurdles for wider industry adoption,” Rommel said.

“Developers need to work together to ensure compatibility among protocols.”