Dr. Richard Mark Soley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of OMG ®, Executive Director of the Cloud Standards Customer Council, and Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium, shares with EAI his viewpoints about the multidisciplinary nature of IoT, the role of standards and non-profit organizations in the field, and the expectations for the IoT 360 Summit 2015.
The IoT360 Summit had quite a dense program with various speakers from different backgrounds. In your opinion, what is the role of the multidisciplinary approach to the future of the IoT?
The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a simple pattern: collection of sensor data (potentially from millions of worldwide sensors), real-time and predictive analytics based on that data, and delivery of decision support and visualization to policy-makers. That requires cooperation across the spectrum from the owners of the data collected, to intelligent analysis, to deep understanding of the roles of policy-makers — a careful dance of technology, funding strategies, social implications and political considerations. It is the definition of multidisciplinary!
As CEO of a not-for-profit technology standards consortium, could you explicate the role of standards and non-profit organizations in the future of IoT?
My role in the IoT space is twofold: as Executive Director of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), my colleagues and I help our 100+ members develop testbeds to discover the disruptive new products and services represented by the IoT opportunity, and also discover gaps and opportunities for standards represented by those testbeds. As Chairman and CEO of the Object Management Group (OMG), we develop standards based on those requirements and others, primarily in the area of semantic representations of the information collected by IoT systems, but also including high-performance, transactional, reliable publish and subscribe interconnection standards such as, for instance, the Data Distribution Services (DDS).
What are your main expectations from the 2015 edition of IoT 360 Summit? Which issues would you like to be discussed at the Summit?
I would like to see the continuation of discussions of academic and technical issues of IoT, as well as the excellent sessions on national and international research funding; but I would also like to see more detailed discussion of start-up ideas based on IoT and case studies of successful IoT implementation.
