by Wael Diab
Senior Director, Huawei Technologies
IIC Steering Committee Secretary
IIC Liaison Working Group Chair
The Industrial IoT revolution promises a tremendous economic and transformational social opportunities. To realize these gains, a number of barriers need to be overcome. These vary from integration across IT/OT barriers, vertical specific requirements, regional requirements, architecture harmonization across different consortia / SDOs etc. The IIC, through its Liaison Working Group, has worked to build coalitions in the industry via liaison relationships that foster deep collaboration, with the goal of accelerating IIoT adoption and realizing the economic and social gains.
The liaison relationship between IIC and IVI, is an example of this type of collaboration.
On June 1st, the second joint workshop of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) and the Industrial Value Chain Initiative (IVI) was held in Tokyo. The inaugural meeting has been held the same month in 2017 and it was great to see that the number of attendees had grown from about 200 to over 300! Leadership from both organizations shared updates about their respective activities and discussed use cases of interest. Included in the audience were distinguished Japan IIoT influencers.
Both organizations have published their own reference architectures and this workshop gave each group an opportunity to work toward harmonizing the two architectures as they both seek the common goal of accelerating the adoption of the industrial internet. Other important areas of discussion included joint testbeds, use cases, data management and future workshops. The IIC Liaison Working Group recently set up a contributing group underneath it dedicated to making recommendations to the working group around ideas for enhanced collaboration and harmonization. The discussions around the event provided plenty of material for this contributing group, LWG IVCG, to consider over the next year.
As the IIC Steering Committee Secretary and IIC Liaison Working Group Chair, I was honored to give a presentation providing an overview of IIC and the Emerging Industrial IoT, AI and Analytics Ecosystem. In addition to my presentation, the audience heard presentations from:
- Prof.Yasuyuki Nishioka, President of IVI
- Yasuo Matsuoka, Toshiba Corporation
- Mitunori Murata, NSK Ltd.
- Sei Makihara, Panasonic Corporation
- Daisuke Nagai, TIS Inc.
- Hitoshi Sumi, Okuma Corporation
- Jacques Durand, Fujitsu, IIC/IVI Liaison Officer and IIC Steering Committee Member
- Joseph Fontaine, IIC Vice President Testbed Program and Testbed Working Group Chair
- Fernando Nishantha, Bosch Corporation
- Javier Diaz, Aingura IIoT
- Kazunari Okada, National Instruments
- Yuji Watanabe, Executive Director of IVI
- Hatsuko Kouroku, Fujitsu, Workshop Chair
In addition to the main workshop, the IVI leadership and presenters hosted their IIC counterparts around the workshop for a discussion on areas of collaboration and deeper updates on the various topics.