From flying vehicles to smart buildings, this year's IoTSWC will bring the best industrial internet solutions to Barcelona. The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) is the leading organization promoting Industry 4.0 in the US. During the last five years, together with Fira Barcelona, it has been organizing the IoT Solutions World Congress (IoTSWC), the leading conference of industrial IoT. Dr. Richard Soley is the Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium and is responsible for the vision and direction of the organization. In addition to this role, Dr. Soley is Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG) – an international, nonprofit computer industry standards consortium -- and Executive Director of the Cloud Standards Customer Council – an end-user advocacy group.

Edge computing has a very bright future - it is absolutely inevitable. If you are unconvinced, we invite you to read until the end. For the sake of this post - we will use edge and fog computing interchangeably. This is becoming a less controversial position based on a recent exclusive interview with Chuck Byers, OpenFog CTO. The OpenFog Consortium announced at an IoT Evolution Expo keynote in Fort Lauderdale, Florida last month, that their merger with the Industrial Internet Consortium or IIC was finalized.

It promises a major change in mobility and, although not just'built' for IoT, it is heralded as a major driver of the growth of IoT. It's mainly in the scope of IoT trends for 2018 and beyond that we tackle 5G in this overview with a brief explainer and forecasts for the usage and role of 5G in IoT and its expected impact on mobility in evolving connected business realities. When bridging digital and physical by leveraging IoT and cyber-physical systems and when striving towards ever more automation and autonomous decisions in environments such as the smart factories of Industry 4.0, autonomous vehicles, smart buildings, smart cities and connected industrial applications in IoT in manufacturing, to name a few, you do need quite some resources to deal with the resulting deluge of data that needs to be analyzed and gathered to begin with. It's why edge computing, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence become so important in IoT and why edge computing is certainly among the top'IoT evolutions'. In its Worldwide IoT Predictions 2018, announced in a November 1, 2017 webcast, IDC stated that by 2020, IT spend on edge Infrastructure will reach up to 18 percent of the total spend on IoT Infrastructure – and there is quite some infrastructure.

FREMONT, Calif., Aug 23, 2018 – Event organizers announced the lineup of more than 60 presenters, session tracks, tutorials and panel sessions for Fog World Congress 2018, produced by the OpenFog Consortium in collaboration with IEEE Communications Society. The event takes place in San Francisco, Oct. 1-3. Fog World Congress is the world's largest gathering of fog leaders and edge influencers focused on these ground-breaking technologies. Attendees will include technologists, data scientists, application developers, educators, researchers, analysts, VCs and investors, service providers, government agencies and enterprises representing a multitude of industries. The event is uniquely focused on fog computing use cases, architecture, standards, developments and research.

The new standard, IEEE 1934, relies on a reference architecture that best enables the data-intensive requirements of IoT, 5G, and AI applications. OpenFog Reference Architecture for fog computing has been adopted as an official standard by the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA). The new standard, known as IEEE 1934, relies on the reference architecture as a universal technical framework that enables the data-intensive requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The OpenFog Consortium is a thriving ecosystem of organizations who share a collective vision that fog computing is a key enabler to IoT and other advanced concepts in the digital world. "We now have an industry-backed and supported blueprint that will supercharge the development of new applications and business models made possible through fog computing," said Helder Antunes, chairman of the OpenFog Consortium and senior director at Cisco.

Cloud based Platform As a Service (PaaS) and Software As a Service (SaaS) technologies have been used in enterprise markets for many years. They are also the major contributing factors to the rapid growth of IoT market in a wide range of products. PaaS providers offer ready-to-use services like security, data storage, device management and big data analysis. In addition, a number of SaaS companies provide application level services like billing, software management and visualization tools. That greatly reduces time-to-market, operation overhead, risks and startup cost.

The OpenFog Consortium announces the release of the OpenFog Reference Architecture, a universal technical framework designed to enable the data-intensive requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The RA marks a significant first step toward creating the standards necessary to enable high-performance, interoperability and security in complex digital transactions. Fog computing is the system-level architecture that brings computing, storage, control, and networking functions closer to the data-producing sources along the cloud-to-thing continuum. Applicable across industry sectors, fog computing effectively addresses issues related to security, cognition, agility, latency and efficiency. The OpenFog Consortium was founded over one year ago to accelerate adoption of fog computing through an open, interoperable architecture.

The OpenFog Consortium released its OpenFog Reference Architecture. And in case you're wondering what in the heck OpenFog is -- which sounds a bit like an oxymoron -- it's a group whose members are working on "fog computing," which adds a hierarchy of compute, storage, networking, and control functions between the cloud and endpoint devices and between gateways and devices. The OpenFog Reference Architecture creates fog computing standards to enable the data-intensive requirements of the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The OpenFog Consortium was founded over one year ago, and it's an independent nonprofit organization run under the direction of its board of directors. Its committees and workgroups are run by its members.