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The OpenFog Consortium, initiated last year by Cisco to promote harmonisation in edge computing (aka fog computing) architecture for IoT networks, will release the first version of its reference architecture in September, ahead of its next members’ meeting scheduled for Austin, Texas September 27-28.
OpenFog Consortium chair and senior director of Cisco’s Corporate Strategic Innovations Group, Helder Antunes, announced the move in a Cisco blog post, saying: “We now have a global footprint that has validated the growing market confidence in the necessity of a fog computing approach. We will continue to grow and expand as IoT deployments become more dependent on integrated cloud to fog capabilities.”
He urged organisations “working in complex or mission-critical IoT, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, or other advanced digital scenarios,” to join the consortium, saying it now had more than 40 members and was on track to meet its first year goal of 50. “Just this month we welcomed several new members, including AT&T and five companies from Japan and Taiwan.”
GE Digital and Schneider Electric joined the board in April. “Toshiba became our first member from Japan and is participating, along with SAKURA Internet, Fujitsu, NTT Communications, and several other organisations, in our first country team focused on regional initiatives,” Antunes said.
Antunes attributed the organisation’s growth to its open approach and to the fact that it had adopted “open horizontal architectural approach.”
Cisco seems to have debuted the concept of fog computing in an academic paper from 2012. I found a very good description in an RFP on Cisco’s web site but was able to retrieve it only from Google’s cache, so I have reproduced it.
It made its public debut at a three day conference in Las Vegas in August 2015. The OpenFog Consortium was formed by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft and Princeton University, through the Princeton University Edge Laboratory in November 2015.
The consortium released its OpenFog architecture white paper, in February 2016 and formed workgroups to address fog computing challenges in the communication, security, testbeds, manageability and software infrastructure.
