We’ve been tracking the progress of The Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry since they launched the community in 2017 and are following them again to the Hannover Messe Industrial IoT mega show, where members are demonstrating integrations contributed to by some of the largest – and smallest – companies in the IoT space.
EdgeX Foundry has steadily grown into a platform and framework designed to improve interoperability and speed development and deployments and now boasts nearly eighty members in seventeen countries, including Canonical, Dell, IOTech, IoTium, RSA, Software AG and VMware and others.
These companies are sharing interactive demos and presenting talks in the EdgeX theatre across mainly industrial IoT themes, in industries ranging from energy and critical infrastructure to smart factories and cities, and while prototypes are still in the works, given the early stages of platform development, use cases during the event will be plentiful.
To mark its momentum, EdgeX Foundry will be announcing their first annual EdgeX Foundry Community Awards, given to individuals who have contributed in leadership and innovation.
As is the style in open source democracies, EdgeX community members nominated their peers, and the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board selected two winners for the Innovation Award, which recognizes individuals who have contributed the most innovation solution, and Contribution Award, which highlights leaders who have helped EdgeX Foundry advance momentum this year through working groups, special projects, and/or contributed large amounts of code, bug fixes or documentation.
We’ll share the winners and their backstories with our readers after they are announced.
“We are excited to recognize leaders in our community who have helped EdgeX Foundry become a trailblazer,” said Jason Shepherd, Chair of the EdgeX Foundry Governing Board and Dell Technologies IoT CTO. “Member companies both small and large are active in the EdgeX technical community in various ways and are leveraging EdgeX in their product and solutions roadmaps. In fact, we’ll see a few prototypes later this year.”
In February 2018, EdgeX Foundry released the California Preview, giving developers early access to some elements of the California code release that support more efficient microservices and establish a path toward scalability. The California preview features several Go Lang microservices that are drop-in replacements for the Java versions, including core services like Core Data, Metadata and Command.
The full California release will be available in Summer 2018 and represents, according to the EdgeX news release, “a major step in evolving the EdgeX framework to support the developer requirements for deployment in business-critical IIoT applications.”
“We are just at the beginning of this IoT journey,” said Keith Steele, EdgeX Foundry Chair of the Technical Steering Committee and CEO of IOTech. “EdgeX Foundry continues to hit milestones, and as we work towards the California release in June, the platform will be able to quickly and securely deliver interoperability between components, applications and services across a wide range of IoT use cases.”
Several project members, including Cavium, Cloud of Things, Dell, IOTech, Mocana, RSA and VMware, have already started to provide commercial solutions based on EdgeX, while others have embedded EdgeX technologies into their product and solution roadmaps. Additionally, the Government of Serbia Innovation Fund has awarded member Mainflux a grant to develop MFX-1, an IoT edge gateway powered by EdgeX platform. For more information about the grant, click here.
EdgeX Foundry has made significant progress in its first year and has reached engagement on a global scale from countries such as the United Kingdom, South Korea, Serbia, Spain, Tunisia, Canada, Israel, Germany and Japan. More than 200 people from member companies join weekly and quarterly face-to-face meetings to align on project goals, develop working groups and identify project maintainers and committers across key functional areas. This month, EdgeX Foundry welcomes the addition of five new members, including Civil Infrastructure Platform (CIP), ETRI, ISSAT Mateur, Samsung SDS and Volterra.
Samsung SDS, a global software solutions and IT services company, recently joined EdgeX Foundry to expand their enterprise mobility, security and analytics portfolio. "With the explosion of IoT connectivity across all industry sectors, we are seeing a demand for monitoring and operation of the edge as well as optimization and analytics through intelligent edge platform from our customers,” said Gyeongil Chae, the Vice President and Head of the Enterprise IoT Business Team for Samsung SDS. “Samsung SDS is excited to collaborate with EdgeX Foundry members, and look forward to working with them in developing standardized framework for IoT edge computing that ensures interoperability and vendor neutrality. In fact, we plan on enhancing the competitiveness of edge computing in industrial IoT by applying the EdgeX framework to our SDS IoT platform, Brightics IoT.”
The EdgeX Foundry booth is located in Hall 6: B17. More information on the Hannover Messe event is available here.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
