FIWARE Foundation official & FIWARE Summit

The FIWARE Foundation has been formally registered on October 28th, with headquarters in Berlin, aimed at supporting the continued growth of FIWARE, the open source platform called to become the de-facto standard for development of IoT-enabled smart services.

To date, most IoT and smart cities technology platforms have required alignment to one proprietary company’s set of standards or another, recreating the vendor lock-in challenges that are currently stifling innovation in smart cities, smart manufacturing including Industry 4.0 and the burgeoning Agrifood market. The creation of the FIWARE Foundation gives cities, industry, business, universities and non-profit organizations greater confidence in being able to build solutions that can scale across geographic areas, can connect with a wide range of hardware and sensor technologies, interoperate with all kind of business systems and databases and that give full power to industry and government to continue adapting and growing their solutions as they see fit.

The FIWARE Foundation was formally constituted as a non-profit association with Atos, Engineering, Orange and Telefónica, acting as founders. The Foundation is charged with supporting the FIWARE mission: to build an open, sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors.  

Highly respected industry thought leader, Ulrich Ahle, has been appointed as Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation. Ahle brings career-long expertise in industry and smart technologies working at Nixdorf Computer AG, Siemens IT Solutions & Services and Atos. He is also member of the Board of the Industrial Data Space organization in Germany.

Ulrich Ahle: “I’m fascinated about the broad functionality and the size of the FIWARE community which has been created with the support of the European Commission during the first phases of FIWARE. It is now our task to industrialize and globalize the FIWARE approach with an additional focus on Smart Industry including Industry 4.0 and Smart Agrifood to enable companies and organizations in these markets to digitize their processes and business models.”

The FIWARE Foundation will be instrumental in sharing resources and supporting the activities of the vibrant FIWARE Community (including the operations of the FIWARE Lab, a sandbox environment enabling experimentation with FIWARE technologies). The FIWARE community so far spans over 100 cities, hundreds of startups building the next generation of smart applications, 16 accelerators, 25 innovation hubs and hundreds of developers contributing to the technology.

“The FIWARE Foundation will warrant that the principles of openness, transparency and meritocracy are preserved. Everyone will benefit from the dynamics of a Community involving multiple players and where all contributions are welcomed.” said Eduardo Navarro, Chief Commercial Digital Officer at Telefónica.

The founders seek to enlarge the FIWARE Foundation membership with new members who share the same vision and ambition.  A public Open Call for Membership has been announced inviting organizations to join at different membership levels, sharing their expertise and contributing from key domain areas including Smart Cities, Smart Agrifood and Smart Industry.

As Hubert Tardieu, Personal Advisor to ATOS CEO, explained: “Joining the FIWARE Foundation brings the opportunity to drive the evolution of a technology that will lead how digital services will be built in the future. Community participants will be amongst the first to be able to enjoy the benefits derived from participating in this ecosystem”.

“The impact FIWARE can have is global, addressing the needs of multiple sectors.  Therefore, the FIWARE Foundation is open to new members worldwide from all kinds of backgrounds and sectors. We are excited by the many inquires we are receiving.  It clearly shows us the demand for open standards that can work across multiple sectors,” Mari-Noëlle Jégo-Laveissière, Senior Executive VP Innovation, Marketing and Technologies at Orange, mentioned.

To celebrate and share the goals of the FIWARE Foundation, the first FIWARE Summit will be held in Málaga, Spain, 13-15 December 2016. A large group of companies, cities, accelerators, researchers, developers, public authorities and non-profit organizations are expected to meet and join the Foundation at the Summit.

“The world is immersed in a profound digital transformation.  We need to build the future based on strong pillars and accessible to all. And that means open standards. The FIWARE Foundation will be key in driving FIWARE to become the open source technology of choice for creation of smart digital services,” Said Paolo Pandozy, CEO at Engineering SpA. “It will ensure the long-term availability of FIWARE for all users, for free, forever.”

Information on how to become members of the FIWARE Foundation can be found at www.fiware.org/foundation/join/
Information about the first FIWARE Summit can be found at www.fiware.org/summit