Open Grid Alliance Solidifies Its Foundation and Welcomes New Members

Twenty-Seven (27) New Members Join the OGA on Its Mission to Evolve the Internet

PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Launched in April, the Open Grid Alliance (OGA) is today 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:

Commentary from OGA Founding Members

Alphabetically, by company name.

“Accedian is obsessed with assuring the best possible experience for end-users. The Open Grid Alliance enables collaboration to reimagine the Internet. We provide visibility across the entire stack including virtualization, orchestration, automation and application layers to develop new levels of performance and deliver exceptional end-user experience, which is our number one priority.”

– Richard Piasentin, Chief Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer, Accedian

“The Open Grid Alliance represents an important initiative to democratize and build a powerful platform for the next step in the evolution towards a society built on digital services. We are proud to be part of this initiative and believe that our technology contributes critical capabilities.”

– Mats Eriksson, CEO, Arctos Labs

“Arm Neoverse is addressing demands for a solid cloud to edge infrastructure to deliver on the promises of the next era of compute. As a new member of OGA, we are committed to working alongside other leaders in this industry to deliver solutions that enable new levels of intelligence, automation, and security.”

– Eddie Ramirez, vice president of marketing, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm

“The Open Grid Alliance is a key step forward in creating a collaborative environment for next generation infrastructure. We are pleased to join the alliance and support it with our experience creating the Arrcus Connected Edge (ACE) platform.”

– Keyur Patel, founder and CTO, Arrcus

“blocz IO Ltd is pleased to announce its position as a Founding Partner of the Open Grid Alliance (OGA) during its official formation as a non-profit organisation. With our own Edge Data Centre and Lab based within the Cambridge (UK) research park, working in private cloud, scaling networks, 5G, blockchain and more, blocz is a longer-term supporter of the inevitable evolution required to move from a legacy core-centric model towards an open decentralised internet starting at the edge.

With the fast-paced deployments of IoT, AI & ML, 5G networking, dWeb & dApps powered by web 3.0 being spearheaded by existing and start-up organisations, our requirements for low-latency networking, data security, data ownership and data placement is growing exponentially. blocz believes the OGA is the ideal foundation to drive the innovation needed to evolve the Internet at a global scale and address the issue of the ever-increasing digital universe and the ability of the internet to cope with our ever-growing dependency on data and low latency connectivity.”

– Lee Norvall, CEO, blocz IO Ltd

“We are really excited by the work being done by the Open Grid Alliance and contributing as a founder member. This is an important evolutionary step for technology and it is great to see cross-industry participation from so many important contributors. This is an important initiative for the future of edge computing and we are delighted to be part of this group building the new foundations.”

– Duncan Clubb, Head of Digital Infrastructure Advisory, CBRE

“The acceleration of climate change is occurring at the same time as the increase in the use of cloud computing and AI solutions. At the rate things are going, the use of digital will allow us to enjoy new solutions for a better world but at the same time get worse for the planet if we stay with the current internet architectures. We need change for a real better world and innovative deeptech startups should be part of this revolution.”

– Richard Chénier, CEO, Centech

“The Open Grid Alliance provides a great industry platform for the coordination across software and infrastructure that will be necessary to bring edge computing to its full potential.”

– Paul Reddick, vice president of strategy, business and product development, Crown Castle

“DriveNets disrupted the networking market, working with some of the largest service providers in the world to build networks like cloud. We believe that the Internet needs to be re-architected into a shared platform based on a wide eco-system of partners, to empower the next wave of application and service innovation. Being among the first members of OGA, we are excited to see it expanding so rapidly with a significant set of new members that are joining us to drive this change.”

– Ido Susan, CEO, DriveNets

“The Grid, along with its optimization models, AI algorithms, and control policies, will contribute substantially to the revolution of the next-generation Internet.”

– Kim Khoa Nguyen, associate professor, director of IoT and Cloud Computing Laboratory, University of Quebec’s Ecole de technologie superieure (ÉTS)

“Real-time analytics and AI are core to fulfilling the vision and plan of the OGA. Distributed, on-demand analytics intelligence is critical for gaining the customer experience and network operations insights companies will need across the shared global digital foundation the OGA is working to create.

Guavus has been at the forefront of AI and big data analytics for more than 15 years — the largest telecom providers worldwide have deployed our analytics solutions to overcome their business challenges impacting CX, service quality and operating efficiency, revenue and profitability across increasingly complex multivendor networks. And through our partnerships with the members of the OGA and other world-class industry leaders, we’re excited to see our SQLstream real-time streaming analytics being used by companies in other key verticals — transportation, manufacturing, aerospace to smart cities…to see how they’ll make this digital transformation and create the best experience for their customers and a better world for us all.”

– Alex Shevchenko, CEO, Guavus (a Thales company)

“The Open Grid is critical to unleashing innovation at the edge – we are excited to leverage this distributed platform to bring compelling private mobile services to the enterprise.”

– Allwyn Sequeira, CEO, Highway9 Networks

“Hivelocity operates bare metal at the edge around the world. Our core belief is that in a multi-cloud world, plenty of workloads make sense on bare metal. The Open Grid Alliance is built for these workloads and Hivelocity is thrilled to participate.”

– Richard B. Nicholas, senior vice president, corporate development, Hivelocity

“Fueled by the tremendous momentum of 5G and buildout of the edge, the industry needs an infrastructure that is programmable, scalable and efficient, from the network to the edge and to the cloud. Joining the Open Grid Alliance (OGA), and its vast ecosystem of industry leaders, will help enable these important infrastructure innovations that will make it possible to support a host of new applications and services.”

– Caroline Chan, vice president, Network and Edge Group; general manager, Network Business Incubator Division, Intel

“Distributed compute, sensing and learning will enable true resiliency, privacy and scalability. At Invision AI, these principles are the core of everything we are doing. We are incredibly excited to be joining like-minded organizations to accelerate this evolution.”

– Karim Ali, founder and CEO, Invision AI

“Re-architecting the Internet is both ambitious and essential. By enabling context aware solutions that span from core to edge, we can overcome the complexity, incompatibility and scarcity limitations businesses face today. Achieving this, at the scale of the Open Grid opportunity, demands the most cost-effective and sustainable edge infrastructure. ITRenew build its Sesame open hardware solutions to enable both, making it easy to consistently deploy and manage across diverse locations and topologies. We’re proud to join forces with the other OGA founding members as we seek to evolve what is arguably the common foundation for business growth.”

– Ali Fenn, president, ITRenew

“Macrometa’s mission is to make every developer a hero. Our powerful yet simple serverless platform for data intensive and stateful edge applications is finding rapid adoption from cloud developers looking to build real time data driven apps that other Cloud platforms find impossible. Macrometa looks forward to collaborating with the OGA to make the edge a thriving community of fearless innovators, and utopia for cloud developers.”

– Chetan Venkatesh, CEO, Macrometa

“Masergy is proud to be part of the Open Grid Alliance, building the next generation of the internet that will operate autonomously and predictably at the edge and enable next generation applications for our clients.”

– Terry Traina, Chief Technology Officer, Masergy

“Menya Solutions – The AI Division of Levio — is pleased to join the Open Grid Alliance. The Open Grid aligns well with Menya’s vision and mission that places AI at the heart of digital transformation. It is the platform the world will need to provide future Internet services to thousands of interconnected and coordinated sensors, devices, and applications in virtually all sectors of the economy.”

– Froduald Kabanza, Chief Technical Advisor, Menya Solutions

“Mitacs is thrilled to be a member of the Open Grid Alliance (OGA). We share the OGA’s goal of driving innovation and look forward to contributing to the realization of its goal of evolving the internet. Using our extensive connections to Canada’s postsecondary institutions and its technology ecosystem, we will foster research collaborations between the academic sector and OGA members and help them capitalize on Canada’s technology strengths, particularly in the areas of future networks, telecoms, 5G, AI, quantum computing, clean technology, and more.”

– John Hepburn, CEO and Scientific Director, Mitacs

“A true Open Grid will enable consistency and predictability across multiple clouds and mobile telecom networks with the highest quality of performance. This will make it possible to build next-generation applications and services that leverage the wireless cellular network infrastructure. Telecommunications providers require applications that can scale globally and dynamically across highly distributed networks and infrastructure. The Open Grid Alliance is starting one of the most important industry conversations.”

– Jason Hoffman, CEO, MobiledgeX

“The Power of the Grid comes from the various intersections, interlocks and coordinates. The intersections create resilience against adversity. Every single coordinate plays a significant role. It brings exponential trust, security and even experiences for the world that will become. The Grid, in the same way, unlocks this new world of transformative communication and the internet.”

– Nida Sahar, founder, Nife Labs

“Our mission at OVA, in association with the Open Grid Alliance, is to accelerate the democratization and adoption of the metaverse through 5G technology. Our content creation software, StellarX, enables organizations to set up a central metaverse that gives teams space to create and share the work that matters. From creating 3D content, saving custom templates, to all-hands training scenarios, and more.”

– Harold Dumar, CEO, OVA.ai

“It is time to reconsider the basic operation of the internet and how data, intelligence and connectivity interact. We are hitting the limits of what current frameworks can achieve; the applications of tomorrow will require the support of the grid of tomorrow.”

– Fabrice Labeau, director of operations, STARaCom Research Cluster

“OGA is a must when considering that every device used by humans down to the smallest and simplest machines will have some form of electronic intelligence and require network access and resources. Thus, we want and need the intelligence, resources and access to be available at the edge of the network for a real decentralized internet with guaranteed interoperability and lightning-fast new technology deployment. UdeS is proud to participate, through OGA, in the definition of the fourth generation Internet.”

– Vincent Aimez, Ph.D., vice president, Partnerships and Knowledge Transfer, University of Sherbrooke

“ZEDEDA is proud to join the Open Grid Alliance and contribute to building the next generation of the internet. As an edge orchestration company, ZEDEDA is on the front lines of the distributed data explosion and both the challenges and opportunities it is driving. We believe it’s critical to openly collaborate on evolved internet architecture to be able to support, propel, and benefit from new innovation opportunities.”

– Said Ouissal, CEO and founder, ZEDEDA

Additional Resources

Read a post from OGA Lead Founding Member Kaniz Mahdi on how personalized automation will help humanity as a whole: Re-imagining the Internet for Planet-scale Automation
Read The Open Grid Manifesto
Follow @OpenGridAllianc on Twitter

About Open Grid Alliance

Open Grid Alliance (http://opengridalliance.org) is a member-supported collaboration organization that produces vendor-neutral strategies to re-architect the Internet with grid topologies needed to scale globally. The original Founding Open Grid Alliance members include CBRE, Dell Technologies, DriveNets, MobiledgeX, PacketFabric, Vapor IO, and VMware with an invitation for more organizations and contributors. The Open Grid Alliance welcomes additional participants, contributors and supporters.