The IoT M2M Council has announced that Arrow Electronics has joined its Board of Governors as a sustaining member-company. With 25,000 enterprise users, OEMs, and applications developers as members, the IMC claims to be the largest and fastest-growing trade group serving the nascent technology sector.

"The IMC is gathering IoT buyers at a tremendous scale," says Aiden Mitchell, VP of IoT Global Solutions at Arrow, who will represent the company on the IMC board. "The community the IMC has built covers 24 different vertical markets with a truly global footprint. At Arrow, our offerings cover everything related to device connectivity--from individual sensors to comprehensive turnkey systems--so the breadth and diversity of the IMC membership is a great fit."

To ease the purchase of IoT technology, the IMC has just published its first template RFP for IoT buyers, specifically covering IoT software platforms. The document was forged in an open-source, wiki-based development process with input from numerous software vendors and over 100 self-identified IoT buyers. The group has retained a third-party consultancy to begin assessing platforms from participating software vendors against the RFP, and is making the document available to its rank-and-file members. Future topics for the IMC's RFP program will include hardware connectivity services.

"To ease the deployment of connected devices, Arrow provides solutions for specific market applications--from retail to agriculture to industry. We see our IMC membership as the next logical step in accelerating the adoption of pre-integrated IoT application solutions, while driving broader collaboration with the IMC ecosystem," says Mitchell.

The IMC will hold its Annual General Meeting on 9 November 2017 at the Marriott Copley Hotel in Boston, where it will elect new officers, decide on new projects for the coming year and offer an afternoon conference program.