In mid-February, I traveled to the NASSCOM India Leadership Forum 2017 (NILF). NASSCOM ( http://www.nasscom.in/) is the nearly 30-year-old association of Indian ICT firms, and NILF is its flagship event. I was proud to join the glittering luminaries on the agenda, talking about IoT standards and testbeds of course (VIDEO). The entire leadership of the Indian ICT industry was there, plus an impressive collection of speakers from around the world focusing on digital disruption (and a lot of discussion about how United States politics might have an impact, positive or negative, on the Indian ICT industry). There were thousands of people in attendance as there was constantly a large crowd both in the plenary hall and outside playing the connection game. The theme of the Forum was “Re-imagine don’t Re-engineer” which fit nicely with my presentation about how the Industrial Internet Consortium® (IIC®) is enabling industries to be reimagined, due to digital disruption.
This very impressive setting was also the venue to sign an initial agreement between the IIC® and NASSCOM's new Centre of Excellence for the Internet of Things to advance the Industrial Internet. At the signing ceremony, we were lucky enough to have not only myself and the CEO of the new Centre, but also NASSCOM leadership including: President Chandrashekhar Rentala and Chairman CP Gurnani, and leading IIC members Bill Ruh of General Electric and Venkat Sarma of L&T Infotech. This is, as they say in Casablanca, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
I also had the opportunity to talk to the three gentlemen about the India chapter of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and its annual event in Bangalore, which I will try to participate in this year.
At the end of last month and the beginning of March, I attended Mobile World Congress 2017, the big GSM Association conference hosted by Fira de Barcelona in the lovely city of Barcelona. As always, it was a great show with solid interest from attendees in IIC testbeds and Object Management Group® IoT activities. I was almost overwhelmed by at least a dozen analyst and press briefings.
This week, the Object Management Group announced some exciting news—OMG® formed a partnership with the National Retail Federation (NRF). OMG will now manage certain retail standards—formerly under the auspices of NRF— that increase quality, decrease cost and increase choice in retail systems. You can read the release here. I’m also visiting Berlin for Bosch ConnectedWorld and a workshop in support of the G20 Meeting this week. I’ll have more information about these meetings in an upcoming blog.
Next week, I head out to the OMG TC and IIC quarterly meetings in Reston, VA. The OMG Special Events Program includes a lineup of thought leaders in: business architecture, IIoT security, healthcare and business process modeling, cybersecurity and cyber resilience, among other standards work. On March 23, the IIC is hosting a complimentary Industrial Internet Innovation Forum, a public forum designed to assist organizations in developing their IIoT strategy .There is still time to register for these events. The public is also welcome to attend a complimentary gathering on the morning of March 22 to learn and network over user experiences, vendor challenges and successes with products based on OMG standards with OMG Ambassadors. The event includes a continental breakfast from 8:30 a.m. - 10:00 a.m. in the Grand Ballroom D at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Reston, Virginia.
After my stay in Reston, I travel back to Germany for CeBIT's Global Forum and IoT Forum, where I’ll be speaking about testbeds & standards.
