February and early March have been very hectic travel months, First, I flew to Orlando for a keynote, then to India for meetings and to accept an award. Berlin was the next stop in my itinerary, where I also keynoted a major industry event and then met with senior government officials to talk about the future of Industrie 4.0 and the Industrial Internet Consortium. And then to cap everything off, I flew to Las Vegas to keynote at an IBM conference. I'm still in Europe, but I am very excited to fly back to the States in a few days, to Reston, Virginia where OMG will host its quarterly Technical Meeting!
I kicked off my latest business trips to Orlando, Florida where I led a panel discussion at the ARC Industry Forum. This year was the Forum’s nineteenth and it attracted 700 attendees from approximately 300 different companies and 25 countries. The theme for this year's Forum was "Industry in Transition: The Information-driven Enterprise for the Connected World.” In the afternoon, I moderated a panel titled “Global Initiatives of the Industrial Internet Consortium” to a standing room only audience. The focus was on the technologies and security requirements companies will need to enable the Industrial Internet in their organizations. Other IIC members of the panel were: Jamie Smith, Director of Embedded Systems Product Marketing, National Instruments; Jean-Philippe Provencher, Senior Director, IoT Solution Strategy, ThingWorx, a PTC company; and Ekaterina Golovchenko, Fellow, TE Connectivity.
My next stop took me to 12429 km (7768 miles) to Mumbai, India where I met with a senior executive from a conglomerate operating in oil exploration & production, refining and marketing, petrochemicals, retail and telecommunications. He was well aware of OMG, having been at IBM for years as well as ExxonMobil, Pfizer and other brand name companies. I expect I can look forward to many more conversations, explaining how membership in OMG and IIC can help facilitate his IT goals.
At least my next destination was in the same country! At Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India (many people just call it "Vizag"), I delivered the keynote at the Vision 2020 with the Internet of Things conference and received the first Panini Award, (named after a Sanskrit scholar credited with the invention of the first formal notation to describe languages) from the Super Computing Consortium of India. The honor recognized OMG foundational work on distributed object computing standards.
Berlin was my next destination, where I was honored to keynote alongside the CEO of Bosch at the Bosch ConnectedWorld 2015 conference. I spoke about the convergence between the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution.You can watch a video excerpt here. All in all, the event went extraordinarily well, including a live demonstration of the first public testbed from the Industrial Internet Consortium, and I was approached all day long (and for the rest of the conference) with interest in IIC and OMG IIoT standards.
After the Bosch event, I spent the entire day at the BMWi, the Economics & Energy Ministry of Germany, eventually meeting with Staatssekretär Machnig to discuss how IIC and Germany’s Industrie 4.0 (I4.0) program complement each other, and how OMG also provides standards in the space. While there, I also attended a meeting on the future of I4.0 standards. It was gratifying to listen to all the speakers talk about how important it is to work with OMG so that eventual standards, such as those expected to come from the I4.0 program, are international.
The meeting went off well enough that I am invited to attend an announcement by the German government and influential industry groups on the upcoming launch of an Industrie 4.0 Consortium at the Hanover Fair in April. Stay tuned for further developments!
The following week, I delivered a keynote at the IBM InterConnect 2015 event in Las Vegas and met with many key press and analysts. The event drew more than 20,000 attendees on-site and another 10,000 on live stream. No wonder the event completely filled the conference space at both the MGM Grand and the Mandalay Bay hotels!
Wherever my travels take me, I’m struck by the brand awareness of OMG and of course, the promises that open standards bring to create new markets. I look forward to espousing OMG standardization initiatives and cementing my relationships with all the like-minded organizations and individuals I’ve met in my trips.
On to Reston!
