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The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) had a massive booth at CES 2017, demonstrating how Smart Home devices could communicate together in a living room, kitchen, and garage type setting.

OCF is an application layer that can work with different types of networking technologies such as WI-FI, Ethernet, and Thread.  With OCF merging with the AllSeen Alliance, OCF has emerged as the largest standards based IoT application layer solution that is supported by heavy hitters like Intel, Qualcomm, Microsoft, Samsung, etc.  Whereas Apple's HomeKit and Amazon Alexa are proprietary IoT solutions, OCF promises a more standardized solution that can be used across many companies and brands.

Samsung showed up quite a lot of commercially released products which supported OCF such as their sexy new QLED Smart TV.  In the living room demo, a Microsoft Surface computer can be used to control everything.  Note that Windows 10 is at some point expected to fully support OCF especially given that AllJoyn technology is now part of OCF.

Samsung's air conditioners and robot vacuum cleaners also now support OCF.

Intel, working with LG, demonstrating how a refrigerator could also add Smart Home controls and OCF based connectivity.

OCF also works with the automotive industry's GENIVI Alliance to extend the IoT experience from the home into the car.

Samsung and Microsoft intend to have a lot of products supporting OCF and it will be interesting to see how the OCF ecosystem will grow.