This week, I was glad to see my old friend and former fellow 8Bar teammate Ian Hughes, for drinks while he was in town. I found out he was attending the Quarterly meeting of the Industrial Internet Consortium in Raleigh, NC. Ian is now an analysts at 451 Research and focuses on AR/VR and the Internet of Things. IBM’s Watson IoT unit, where I work as a Strategist, is also a member. I hadn’t realized that the meeting was in town, and found out from Ian that no IBMers were at the meeting. So Tuesday morning I scrambled to make sure I could attend, and that I could participate in appropriate sessions.
The IIC, is an international consortium that is focused on industrial uses for the Internet of Things. As you can image there are tons of working groups, Technicial groups, and breakouts ranging in all kinds of topics. The big news this year is that the IIC and the OpenFog Consortium were merging. As businesses look at benefiting from instrumenting their assets and processes, AI is happening at all levels of the architecture, Edge, Fog, Local Data Centers, Cloud and Enterprise Data Centers. This means that figuring out the right architecture for any specific use case requires understand requirements, processes, and technical standards. By bringing together these two communities I am sure we will have a better understanding of how businesses should implement specific use cases.
As a first time attendee, I spent much of my time listening and reading. I did get to meet interesting technical and business leaders from many companies. And look forward to seeing what my next steps may be, as a member of the IIC.