Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK – June 22, 2017 – IOTech, a software company established with a vision to “build and deploy the pervasive, open, and software-defined compute infrastructure for the Industrial IoT edge” and founded by industry-acknowledged leaders and specialists in real-time software platforms for edge and fog systems, today announced that its CEO Keith Steele had been elected as the founding Chair of Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry™ open source project’s Technical Steering Committee.
EdgeX Foundry™ is a vendor-neutral open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation building a common open framework for Industrial IoT edge computing. The EdgeX platform enables and encourages the rapidly growing community of IoT solutions providers to work together in an ecosystem of interoperable components to reduce uncertainty, accelerate time to market, and facilitate scale. By enabling the use of existing connectivity standards together with a marketplace of interoperable developer value-add it will simplify development and deployment of IoT solutions in a wide variety of use cases. The initiative is aligned around a common goal: the simplification and standardization of the foundation for tiered edge computing architectures in the Industrial IoT market while still enabling the ecosystem to provide significant value-added differentiation.
The EdgeX Foundry™ Technical Steering Committee (TSC) is a committee composed of technical leaders from the open source project responsible for oversight of the technical codebase, the technical community and release process.
Specific TSC responsibilities include:
- Coordinating the technical direction of the EdgeX Foundry™ Project, including the architecture and projects to achieve the mission and scope of the EdgeX Foundry™ Project;
- Approving project proposals (including, but not limited to, incubation, deprecation and changes to a project’s charter or scope) in accordance with a project lifecycle document to be developed, approved and maintained by the TSC;
- Designating top level projects, umbrella projects and facilitating synergy, collaboration and technical coordination (API, data models etc.) across all projects;
- Creating sub-committees or working groups to focus on cross-project technical issues or opportunities;
- Coordinate technical community engagement with the end user community with respect to requirements, high level architecture, implementation experiences, use cases, etc.;
- Communicating with external and industry organizations concerning project technical matters;
- Appointing representatives to work with other open source or standards communities;
- Establishing community norms, workflows or policies for releases; discussing, seeking consensus, and where necessary, voting on technical matters relating to the code base that affect multiple projects; and
- Establishing election processes for Maintainers or other leadership roles in the technical community that are not within the scope of any single project.
As a global middleware pioneer and entrepreneur for over 25 years, with a proven record of starting and growing successful software companies, Keith Steele brings a vast amount of experience, knowledge and enthusiasm to the role of TSC Chair. Keith recently founded IOTech after exiting PrismTech following its sale and successful transition to ADLINK. Under Keith's leadership as founder and CEO, PrismTech grew from a start-up to become a global player serving military and Industrial IoT customers around the world in markets such as Telecommunications, Aerospace and Defense, Industrial Automation and Smart Energy. Keith has international M&A experience in the US and Europe, he began his career with Texas Instruments and has since held CEO roles with a multinational systems integration business, an international contract R&D company and an oil industry-focused software products company. Keith has been a vocal promoter of international standards and served on the boards of POSC and the OMG.
Keith Steele, IOTech’s CEO commented, “I am delighted to have been elected to this important and exciting role and look forward to working with some really talented colleagues on the TCS and at the Linux Foundation. If EdgeX Foundry™ is to be a success it’s essential that the TCS provides the strong technical leadership and direction needed to support the EdgeX community and the wider IIoT market.”
"Industry collaboration is vital to ensuring the success of the IoT market and unifying the marketplace,” said Philip DesAutels, Senior Director of IoT at The Linux Foundation. "We are thrilled that Keith is leading the EdgeX Foundry Technical Steering Committee and are confident that his leadership will greatly help us develop a framework for accelerating enterprise and industrial IoT."