As we approach the first anniversary of the Open Fog Consortium, I am proud of the strides we have made in building a diverse community dedicated to an open, collaborative approach to fog computing technology. Just this week, OpenFog and Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) announced a new strategic agreement aimed at accelerating development of fog computing technology and proofs of concept.

The agreement will enable OpenFog and BSC to co-create new fog computing concepts and architectures, and to jointly promote them in industry activities. BSC will have access to OpenFog's reference architecture and testbeds, and OpenFog will have access to BSC's supercomputing facilities for testing new concepts and use cases.

Why is this important?

First, BSC is a prestigious provider of high-performance computing services to Europe's top scientists and researchers. In addition to hosting a world-class supercomputing infrastructure, it is dedicated to transferring knowledge and technology to business and society-the perfect partner to help OpenFog prove new use-case scenarios.

Second, by collaborating the two organizations will be able to jointly contribute to an open, interoperable platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) and beyond. This will be particularly helpful as we explore emerging scenarios in artificial intelligence and 5G applications. For example, 5G can use fog capabilities to move radio control functions onto local and regional computing and control platforms and enable service providers to deploy applications inside radio access networks. Working with a partner like BSC will help accelerate development of these applications.

Finally, as chairman of the OpenFog Consortium, I am particularly pleased to see this expansion of the ongoing collaboration we have fostered across industries, academic organizations, and geographies over the last year.

OpenFog was founded last November by ARM, Cisco, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Princeton University, and has since grown into a robust organization with nearly 50 members from across the globe. Our aim is to accelerate the deployment of fog computing technologies, with a focus on developing open architectures that will support intelligence at the edge of IoT.

Even before this formal agreement, Cisco and several other OpenFog members have been working with BSC on various fog computing initiatives. For example, Cisco and the City of Barcelona worked with BSC and several other partners last year to conduct a proof of concept on fog computing focused development of a multi-vendor software platform for city services. With this new agreement, we look forward to even more in-depth collaboration.