It’s been an exciting week at NetFoundry, with two industrial IoT (IIoT) announcements, very much related to each other.
On Monday, while our IIoT team was heading into dozens of meetings at Hannover Messe, the Linux Foundation introduced EdgeX Foundry, a consortium of fifty companies from across the IIoT technology landscape working together to ensure not only interoperability at the edge, but sustainability at the edge. We are proud to be one of the charter menbers, bringing our experience, solutions and opportunities to an impressive array of small, medium, large and massive companies as passionate about the IIoT as are we.
That same day, we announced NetFoundry has also joined the Dell IoT Solution Partner ecosystem, after having been working with Dell EMC’s team for nearly a year on demonstration projects, two of which we featured earlier this year at Mobile World Congress. We are certified in two Dell products purpose built for the industrial IoT, and were honored to demostrate our embedded, service network solutions making IIoT deployments easier to connect, easier to secure, and easier to bring to market in Dell’s booth in Hannover.
The Evolution of Dell’s Fuse and Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry for Industrial IoT
One of the best articles we’ve ready this week on the history of EdgeX Foundry comes from Charles King’s Pund-IT blog.
King writes in his summary:
It would be a mistake to assume the success of any industry coalition, especially one focused on an area like IoT where efforts and commercial solutions are often fragmented and confused. However, The Linux Foundation has a better than average track record of effectively inspiring and leading collaborations that deliver substantial innovative results.
Toss in the involvement of Dell, VMware, Analog Devices, AMD and other influential participants and the new EdgeX Foundry should have what it takes to make substantial contributions to workable, sustainable solutions and services. Overall, the launch of the Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry is good news for enterprise and industrial IoT, and for the organizations that are ready to put its resulting solutions to work.
Read the entire article here. It’s a great lesson in the art of partnership, of collaboration, and commercialization at an important inflection point in the history of the IoT. All of us who have been working in IoT and industrial IoT for years and even a decade or more are aware of the hype cycles, but also aware of the true promise that lies ahead. As has always been the case in the ever-changing world of networking and software, nothing great happens until many great companies and people come together with a plan.
