IOTA – Designed for the IoT machine-to-machine world

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.