Back in November 2011 IBM announced that it was open sourcing its MQTT protocol with the aim of having it become a core technical underpinning in the looming Internet of Things - all it needed was a standards body to pick it up. Oasis has stepped up to the plate, announcing that it will form a technical committee to get the process moving.

The key to MQTT is that it's a publish and subscribe protocol designed to handle short, intermittent messages and so is ideal for M2M/IoT applications because it doesn't expect to deal with a sustained connections. This means that devices can sleep and wake to log information, saving on battery power - an important consideration when information gathering devices are out in the field at the end of an unreliable or low-bandwidth connection.