Market demand on AAL middleware solutions Sample Clauses

Market demand on AAL middleware solutions. Question: How many alternative AAL middleware solutions does the market need, and how do you think “winners” and “losers” will be determined? Do you foresee collaboration between middleware projects, or rather a competition? The common agreement was to let the market decide. This has been a good principle for several years and competition has always been a driver for innovation. Of course participants understood that this will may not led to the best solution or allocation. Nevertheless some recommendations and expectations for the market development were pointed out: ▪ Different solutions for different requirements: the span of available products and products under development is very wide. This may cause a stronger diversification of available middleware and not “one big solution”. ▪ Collaboration: The challenge of developing an AAL middleware which matches nearly all requirements is too big for a single organization. This may led to some kind of collaboration. One form of collaboration could be the exchange of reusable software components on a lower level to combine them to a (general or specific) middleware. ▪ Open Standard: It might be useful to agree on an open standard and use this as basis for independent developments. The market of web browsers is a good example: HTML is the standard here and, based on this, four big competing Browser products (plus several smaller developments) are available. ▪ Co-opetition: Another way could be the co-opetition declared in the AALOA manifesto3. There should be one open source reference implementation and upon this, several forks could be developed. The overall aim should be to a translation from research to industry to achieve stable versions for the market. ▪ Collaboration with other markets: As already suggested in the Lecce declaration4 collaboration between the AAL market and other markets might be suitable. The activities inside the M2M branch are very active in terms of middleware and the challenges are very similar (except that the human factor is missing there).