EdgeX Foundry Builds Momentum for a IoT Interoperability and a Unified Marketplace with Eight New Members

SAN FRANCISCO – July 17, 2017 – EdgeX Foundry, an open source project building a common open framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing, today announced eight new members: Absolute, IoT Impact Labs, inwinSTACK, Parallel Machines, Queen’s University Belfast, RIOT, Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation and Tulip Interfaces.

Launched in April 2017, EdgeX Foundry is a collaborative project of The Linux Foundation that is building an interoperability framework hosted within a full hardware- and OS-agnostic reference software platform to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX can quickly and easily deliver interoperability between connected devices, applications, and services, across a wide range of use cases.

“We are very excited to welcome these new members to our rapidly growing community. They are a geographically diverse group, but are working together to ensure that hardware, operating systems and application frameworks can all speak the same EdgeX language,” said Philip DesAutels, PhD Senior Director of IoT at The Linux Foundation. “This simplification and standardization of Industrial IoT edge computing will bring significant value to the ecosystem for years to come.”

Last month, EdgeX Foundry brought together technical representatives from member companies as well as the wider technical community for the first face-to-face working meeting. More than 80 people joined in-person or via phone to align on project goals, develop working groups and discuss next steps for the project. EdgeX Foundry also initiated a series of technical training sessions called Tech Talks that are designed to help onboard new developers on to the project. Additional information about these Tech Talks, upcoming EdgeX Foundry meetings and how to participate is available at https://wiki.edgexfoundry.org.

New Member Quotes:

Absolute

“Absolute recognizes the urgent need for advancing and unifying standards in edge computing,” said Jo-Ann Smith, Director of Technology Risk Management & Data Privacy at Absolute. “As IoT rapidly grows, it is important to simultaneously expand an open source framework like EdgeX that benefits all members of the current ecosystem. The EdgeX and Absolute technology will allow customers to meet their business goals with secure data protection on their endpoint agents and IoT servers.”

IoT Impact Labs

“Impact LABS works with a number of EdgeX Foundry members to live pilot IoT solutions for small-to-medium sized businesses that often don’t have access to the latest industrial and enterprise tools and methods,” said Chris Rezendes, Managing Director of Impact LABS.

“Working with EdgeX Foundry will help support our efforts to deploy IoT in communities facing natural resource challenges, smart cities, resilient infrastructure, food security and industry 4.0 markets.”

inwinSTACK

“As a major long-time contributor in open source technologies, inwinSTACK is excited to be a part of a project that is developing an open framework for IoT edge computing,” said Joseph Wang, Vice President of inwinSTACK Inc. “We believe EdgeX Foundry plays a major role in developing a common IoT standard for the market, and our partnership will strengthen our ability to deliver enterprise-grade IoT edge solutions to organizations seeking to drive business values and innovations.”

Parallel Machines

“Our mission is to accelerate the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) I in production environments, making it an accessible technology for an enterprise to harness the power of their data generated by IoT,” said Nir Peled, VP Product and Strategy of Parallel Machines. “In order for edge computing to successfully converge with cutting edge technologies like AI, we need industry leaders to unify around a common platform and tools. We believe EdgeX Foundry will achieve this, and it is a crucial initiative for the success of our mission as it creates a common standard framework for all the fundamental elements of an edge solution.” 

Queen’s University Belfast

“Adding billions of people and ‘things’ to the internet is not easy,” said Dr. Blesson Varghese, Lecturer in Scalable Computing at Queen’s University Belfast. “At Queen’s University Belfast, we are developing world-class research in edge computing to design sustainable internet architectures that seamlessly connect people and devices. We are excited to be working with EdgeX Foundry on solving the global challenge of transforming the future internet.”

RIOT

“The RIOT community provides open source, vendor-independent and community-driven software that supports low-end IoT devices that connect securely with anywhere on the Internet,” said Thomas Eichinger, developer and maintainer for RIOT. “RIOT starts where Linux doesn’t fit so it is natural for the RIOT community to participate and support complementary open-source initiatives like EdgeX Foundry for edge computing.”

Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation

“As a manufacturer and supplier engaged in various sectors from semiconductor to industrial and social infrastructure systems, we recognized the importance of edge computing at a very early stage and have been working on developing the related technology,” said Shigeyoshi Shimotsuji, Director and Vice President of Toshiba Digital Solutions Corporation. “Toshiba and EdgeX Foundry share the same vision for enabling a community of IoT solutions providers to create an interoperable ecosystem. We look forward to leveraging our experiences and technical know-how with EdgeX Foundry to further accelerate the industrial IoT market adoption and drive innovation.”

Tulip Interfaces

“Plug-and-play shop-floor IoT is a key component of Tulip’s Manufacturing App Platform,” said Rony Kubat, co-founder of Tulip Interfaces. “The EdgeX framework will foster an ecosystem which can enable rapid development of new capabilities based on common standards. IoT interoperability will establish an explosion of creativity and empower a new generation of manufacturing engineers. This will lead to flexible and more secure systems that can optimize workflow and, ultimately, change how people work on the factory floor.”

A full list of members can be found here.

About EdgeX Foundry

EdgeX Foundry is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation building a common open framework for IoT edge computing and an ecosystem of interoperable components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions. Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX enables developers to quickly create flexible IoT edge solutions that can easily adapt to changing business needs. To learn more, visit: www.edgexfoundry.org.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world’s top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and commercial adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.