Matt Vasey Elected Chairman and President of the OpenFog Consortium

The OpenFog Consortium announced recently that Matt Vasey, who previously served as Board Secretary, has been elected Chairman and President  of the organization. Vasey, who serves as Director, AI and IoT Business Development at Microsoft, has been an active member of the board since OpenFog’s inception in 2015.

He succeeds OpenFog co-founder Helder Antunes, who recently culminated his successful tenure in his role as chairman.

“Thanks to Helder’s leadership and the efforts of the founding OpenFog members and early fog visionaries, fog is now well positioned to deliver the framework for secure and efficient information processing within the cloud-to-things continuum,” said Vasey. “Fog computing has clearly arrived and building momentum. I’m looking forward to helping to lead the continued growth of new fog-related technologies, market adoption, standards work and implementations.”

The OpenFog Consortium was founded to accelerate the adoption of fog computing, which addresses bandwidth, latency and communications challenges associated with IoT, 5G and AI applications. 

The OpenFog board is continuing to investigate ways to scale the marketing and technical development of fog computing through new partnerships and collaborations to achieve global scale. Key initiatives for 2019 include:

• Expansion of the investment in international testbeds and technical working groups. The Technical committees will continue to build out testbeds and define optimal fog implementations for core vertical markets and horizontal areas, such as cybersecurity. The consortium is already beginning to push toward testbed validation and certification programs with new industry partners.
• Continued expansion of fog in core research areas of IoT, 5G, and AI. Machines, things, and devices are becoming increasingly intelligent, seamlessly connected, and capable of massive storage with the ability to be autonomous and self-aware. Robots, drones, and self-driving cars are early indicators of small and mobile clouds. 

Since its launch, the Silicon Valley-based consortium has grown to more than 60 organizations with OpenFog regional committees in Japan and China. The organization has established numerous relationships, affiliations and liaisons with technology and standards groups; launched the annual Fog World Congress conference; and published the OpenFog Reference Architecture, which was adopted by the IEEE as the fog computing standard.