To advance IoT penetration in consumers’ everyday lives, several technology leaders have founded an IoT consortium focused on fog computing adoption.
Supported by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and the Princeton University Edge Laboratory, the OpenFog Consortium has been designed to accelerate the deployment of Fog technologies through the development of an open architecture.
The non-profit global consortium will also develop other technologies including the capabilities of distributed computing, networking, and storage.
The founding members will build initial frameworks and architectures that reduce the time required to deliver the end-to-end IoT scenarios.
Fog computing technology distributes the resources and services of computation, communication, control, and storage closer to devices and systems at or near the users.
Helder Antunes, chairman of OpenFog and senior director of Cisco’s Corporate Strategic Innovations Group, said: "Today’s announcement represents just the beginning of our efforts to accelerate IoT deployments and value by bringing distributed compute, network, and storage capabilities to IoT endpoints at the edge of the network."
With an emphasis on enterprise IT for IoT, Microsoft sees in the OpenFog Consortium opportunities to open up possibilities for even richer IoT scenarios in business.
Sam George, Microsoft’s partner director for Azure IoT, said: "The founding members of the non-profit global OpenFog Consortium will use proven approaches and existing standards, to accelerate the delivery of the end-to-end IoT technologies, architectures, testbeds and business opportunities that the market is demanding.
"The consortium will also aim to drive industry and academic leadership in fog computing architectures with whitepapers, testbeds and other deliverables that demonstrate best practices for interoperability and composability between cloud and edge architectures."
