Open Grid Alliance expands; 27 new members join internet architecture effort

Open Grid Alliance expands; 27 new members join internet architecture effort

Launched in April, the Open Grid Alliance (OGA) is announcing membership and organizational updates that will establish a strong foundation from which it can rise. Specifically, the OGA is proud to welcome 27 new member organizations and announce its official formation as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization.

The OGA brings together diverse, global, multi-sector, and multi-dimensional technology leaders to tackle an immense challenge – evolving the Internet. The evolution it seeks to foster will go beyond the cloud, and even beyond the edge. The OGA aims to rearchitect the Internet from the communications hub that currently exists, to a global, shared platform that distributes compute, data, and intelligence to where it’s needed, when applications and services demand it, and with guarantees and SLAs. In short, the OGA aims to lay the digital foundation for a better world.

Today also marks the OGA’s official formation as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization and its provisional board comprised of representatives from Dell Technologies, Deutsche Telekom, Vapor IO and VMware. The provisional board will establish the formal board of directors and the organizational structure that supports the organization’s mission. In its first formal membership meeting, the founding OGA members kicked off three work streams:

  • Grid Think Tank – develop a long-term technological vision for the Open Grid and develop a plan to drive toward that vision while, balancing near-term engineering challenges with long-term objectives.
  • Grid Innovation Zones – establish open-innovation ecosystems in targeted metropolitan areas to drive discovery, implementation, and verification of Open Grid technologies, platforms and tools in service of real-world use cases.
  • Grid Market Readiness – identify, create and systematize programs that accelerate the commercial delivery of Open Grid technologies, taking into account the needs and requirements for full-scale, global, and operational deployment of the Open Grid.

Kaniz Mahdi, vice president of Distributed Edge, VMware, said, “The Grid makes incredible things possible – it affords access to resources the Internet of today simply cannot reach. And once we have access to this global pool of (digital, physical and biological) resources, we can use them for bigger, broader and better things, such as planet scale automation empowering resilient societies – and that’s our target ambition for the OGA.”

Cole Crawford, CEO and founder, Vapor IO, said, “The OGA has done a great job attracting a diverse set of stakeholders committed to bringing the Open Grid to life. Now it’s time to implement. It will require deep industry collaboration to bring about the necessary innovations and integrations that make the Open Grid possible. The OGA will serve as a catalyst to accelerate the deployment of next generation Internet infrastructure, applications and services.”

Dr. Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP of Strategy and Technology Innovation, Deutsche Telekom, said, “Unleashing innovation at the edge requires the creation of an open, efficient and globally consistent environment enabling the developer community to easily deploy their applications to users anywhere. Deutsche Telekom has a shared vision and mission with our partners in the Open Grid Alliance to speed up and realize the promise of this globally interoperable 5G and edge ecosystem.”

Read more about the official formation of the Open Grid Alliance in this blog post.

The 34 Founding Member organizations that currently comprise the OGA represent multiple industries, disciplines, and institutions. Founding Member organizations include: Accedian, Arctos Labs, Arm, Arrcus, blocz IO Ltd, CBRE, Centech, Crown Castle, DriveNets, University of Quebec’s Ecole de technologie superieure (ÉTS), Guavus (a Thales company), Highway9 Networks, Hivelocity, Intel, Invision AI, ITRenew, Macrometa, Masergy, Menya Solutions, Mitacs, MobiledgeX, Nife Labs, OVA.ai, STARaCom Research Cluster, University of Sherbrooke, and ZEDEDA.

OGA_Members - Nov 2021

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