After a busy week in Raleigh for the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC™) February’s meeting, I spent a week in Berlin, primarily for meetings with the IOTA Foundation (of which I am a member of the supervisory board) and the McKinsey EMEA IoT Summit 2019. IOTA is doing quite well, focusing on distributed ledger technology ("DLT" or "blockchain") designed for the IoT machine-to-machine world. OMG is looking at the technology for standardization and several IIC members and other interested parties are looking at it for the trustworthiness component of a new testbed or two, so my IOTA Foundation duties meld well with my Object Management Group® (OMG®) ones! There are some interesting and impactful new announcements coming from the Foundation in the coming months ─ including their applications for liaison with both OMG and IIC. Watch this space, as they say!

I also had the opportunity to meet with several key figures at Fraunhofer FOKUS, a longtime supporter and member of OMG and also a member of IIC; they are managing the creation of the Edge Computing Consortium Europe (ECCE), which is bringing together major European players to discuss the future of edge commuting. Though it initially sounds competitive with IIC, the ECCE will work cooperatively with us and has begun applying for liaison even before officially incorporating!

The highlight of the week was my "fireside chat" at the McKinsey EMEA IoT Summit 2019 with McKinsey partner Brett May. Bringing together some hundreds of McKinsey's biggest customers worldwide, this event focused on building IoT ecosystems ─ the core of the IIC approach to its mission after all! Our fireside chat focused on the trends driving IoT adoption, which closely match what we see at both the OMG and the IIC.

Dr Soley (left) discusses IIoT adoption trends with McKinsey’s Brett May (right).

The end of February was also the end of a three-week-long trip encompassing the IIC Quarterly Meeting (in Raleigh, NC, U.S.A.) followed by a number of meetings already outlined in Berlin, Germany and then Barcelona, Spain for MWC19. This quite enormous show (107,000 attendees this year), produced by our IoTSWC show partner Fira de Barcelona for the GSM Association, used to be called "Mobile World Congress" (or just "Mobile" for the Barcelona taxi driver), but the name was shortened to call out the expanded focus beyond mobile telephone handsets and infrastructure. I'm not convinced that "MWC" is particularly easy to pronounce, but along with folding mobile handsets from a few vendors, there were cars on the floor (it is about "mobile" after all!) as well as impressive displays of artificial intelligence systems and other things. Though MWC is supposed to now be about IoT too, the IoT exhibition space we were in was noticeably smaller than last year and the IoT sessions (including my IoT Security session!) were not well attended.

For the first day, I avoided the MWC crowds as I was invited by Telenor Connexion to keynote their invitation-only IoT Think Tank, held at La Gran Florida Hotel atop a small mountain outside Barcelona. Despite the implied promise of a sterling view of the city from atop the hill, the city's smog obscured the view so I didn't take any pictures. The event itself, attended by about 40 executives focusing on digital transformation of their companies, was excellent and I appreciated the chance to talk about IIC testbeds and OMG standards for digitalization.



Dr. Soley moderates an IoT Think Tank panel.

I relented after Monday and spent the rest of the week at MWC, chairing the aforementioned panel on IoT Security and sharing the press & analyst briefing job with Bill Hoffman ─ some two dozen briefings in all. If someone got to Hall 8 (half dedicated to IoT), they were interested in IIC and/or IoTSWC, and there was some fair interest. The underway combination of forces of the OpenFog Consortium with OMG Industrial Internet Consortium got quite a lot of interest; the IIC Security Maturity Model (announced the same week) got even more.

This month the OMG TC meeting is back in Reston, Virginia. The Special Events agenda features OMG member and thought leaders discussing the role of standards in blockchain, space, healthcare, systems modeling and business architecture. In Reston, we’re also kicking off the 30th anniversary of OMG. Celebrating this milestone is a big achievement, so on behalf of OMG, I want to thank all of you who have been a part of the company’s journey through all these years.