The two largest international consortia on the industrial internet of things (IoT) are joining forces to drive the momentum of the industry further.
In a press statement released on Thursday (January 31), the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and OpenFog Consortium said their common goals include the development and promotion of industry guidance and best practices for fog and edge computing.
Founded in March 2014, the IIC is a global, not-for-profit partnership of the industry, government and academia whose members include small and large technology innovators, vertical market leaders, researchers, universities and government organizations.
OpenFog, on the other hand, is a consortium of high-tech industry companies and academic institutions working on the standardization and promotion of fog computing in various fields. It was founded in 2015 by Cisco Systems, Intel, Microsoft, Princeton University, Dell, and ARM Holdings.
The merger brings OpenFog members into the IIC at a time when their complementary areas of technology are emerging in the mainstream.
“The combined organization offers greater influence to members, more clarity to the market, and a lower-risk path to the future for end users,” said Stan Schneider, CEO of Real-Time Innovations (RTI) and Vice Chair of the IIC Steering Committee.
“We are excited to take the first steps toward integrating the OpenFog Working Groups, Testbeds and Use Cases with those of the IIC,” added Matt Vasey, OpenFog chairman and president, and director, AI and IoT business development, Microsoft.
With this development, the IIC Steering Committee, which guides the strategic direction of the organization, has elected two OpenFog principals: Ron Zahavi, Chief Strategist for IoT Standards, Azure IoT, Microsoft; and Mung Chiang, John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering, Purdue University.
Zahavi has extensive experience in all aspects of technology management and solution delivery, 18 of those related to IoT solutions. Dr. Chiang, on the other hand, was previously the Arthur LeGrand Doty Professor at Princeton University and founded the Princeton EDGE Lab in 2009.
“We are looking forward to our continued work at the IIC strengthened with the addition of OpenFog. The combined organization will cover the edge to cloud continuum and leverage the international diversity of its members, regional committees and testbeds,” Zahavi said in a media statement.
Dr. Chiang added that combining the resources and membership of the two organzions is a major step in the evolution of IoT and embedded AI.
Fog computing, also known as edge computing or fogging, is a term created by Cisco that refers to extending cloud computing to the edge of an enterprise's network, according to Webopedia.
