The Innovative Optical and Wireless Network Global Forum (IOWN Global Forum) which seeks to create a smarter, more connected world, recently hosted its third Annual Member Meeting, welcoming nearly 400 registrants from 78 organizations. Additionally, key sessions were live-streamed with over 175 members participating online from around the world.
Dr. Katsuhiko Kawazoe, President and Chairperson of IOWN Global Forum, opened the meeting sharing that “Vision to Reality” was the goal for this eighth member meeting. To do so, the focus of the meeting was to define the next stage of work items needed to deliver Vision 2030 supporting defined use cases, technologies, and architectures while also solving these challenges for a sustainable world. Using a growing list of Proof of Concepts (PoC), members shared their progress in a variety of keynotes, sessions, and workshops for bringing the Vision 2030 into reality.
Successful Annual Member Meeting
Attendees of the Member Meeting had the opportunity to join in deep technical, use case, and operational discussions of the recently released IOWN Global Forum Vision 2030 Roadmap and its deliverables, hear presentations from fellow members, and participate in strategic, technical use case discussions and working sessions.
Chris Wright, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Red Hat, Inc., presented on “IOWN and LINUX for the Environment Sustainability” where he described how IOWN technologies together with open source communities will be the shortest path for our connected world to deliver data-centric communication and computing infrastructure that support environmental sustainability.
Caroline Chan, the Vice President of the Network and Edge Solutions Group at Intel Corporation, shared a keynote titled “Digital Life Enhanced by Rich Compute and Connectivity.” The talk highlighted technology trends of future digital world experiences and how Intel and the ecosystem are best positioned to deliver the network and edge solutions that solve industry challenges. In addition, the discussion underscored why the work of the Forum is essential for developing next-generation global infrastructure, including the 6G system.
In addition to keynote and member presentations, work progressed with in-person meetings and workshops. Of particular importance were PoC status updates and discussions set to enable the Vision 2030 Roadmap. While meetings covered a variety of adjacent and IOWN technologies, several important themes included Energy Efficiency / Conservation, Deterministic Networking, Networking and Computing Joint Session, and Transport Path Calculation Engines (PCE).
Per Beming, IOWN Global Forum Board Member and Head of Standards & Industry Initiatives at Ericsson, followed with closing remarks where he discussed recent accomplishments, current focus areas and future goals for the Forum. In his talk, Beming highlighted the progress made during the member meeting and thanked all attendees for their efforts.
New Directors Elected
As part of the Annual Meeting, five Directors were welcomed to the IOWN Global Forum Board of Directors with deep leadership and diverse technical experiences across the communications ecosystem.
Steve Alexander, Chief Technology Officer, Ciena said, “I’m pleased to be named to the Board of Directors of IOWN Global Forum, of which Ciena has been a member since 2020. Ciena is committed to building a smarter and more connected world, and we look forward to working in concert with the Forum to bring to life NTT’s vision for next-generation communications infrastructure.”
“Orange confirms its commitment to the IOWN Global Forum goals, and our involvement at the Board of Directors to leverage our R&D expertise and network operator perspective across Europe and Africa to help design sustainable, inclusive and trustworthy future digital technologies bringing value to society,” said Gilles Bourdon, Vice President, Wireline Networks and Infrastructure, Orange.
“Fujitsu has actively contributed to the various activities in IOWN Global Forum and collaborated with Forum members for proof-of-concept trials. With the knowledge gained by leading R&D activities and PoC activities, we will work together with the Forum members and accelerate the Forum’s key focus areas including Open All-Photonic Networks, Data-Centric Infrastructure, and Digital Twin Computing,” said Shingo Mizuno, Corporate Executive Officer, Vice Head of System Platform Business, Fujitsu Limited. “Additionally, we will contribute to finding solutions to several social issues by promoting IOWN concepts, fundamental technologies, and practices throughout the world.”
Dr. Tomohiro Otani, General Manager, Technology Strategy Division, KDDI Corporation, said, “We recently joined the Forum and are very honored to be elected onto the Board of Directors. We are excited to start collaborating with member companies of the Forum and promote open innovation in this very advanced technological domain.”
“Accenture’s purpose is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity; we help our clients become the next and best versions of themselves. In this reinvention journey, next-generation network connectivity is a key foundation,” said Jefferson Wang, Accenture Senior Managing Director and Global Network Practice Lead. “But in a recent Accenture survey, 87% of enterprise execs believe their legacy network is a bottleneck to advancing digital transformation. So now we need to innovate beyond today’s technology and power constraints to converge the capabilities of next-generation networks, cloud, AI and security.”
Dramatic Growth Continues
Membership in the IOWN Global Forum has risen steadily to over 120 organizations and academic institutes globally, focused on the development of next-generation networking equipment and devices, device technologies, network-enabled services, next-generation computing, and research in areas such as silicon photonics and distributed computing. In late August of 2022, the Forum celebrated its 100-member milestone and growth has continued, adding over 31 new members in the last 12-month period.
About IOWN Global Forum
IOWN Global Forum’s objective is to accelerate innovation and adoption of a new communication infrastructure to meet our future data and computing requirements through the development of new technologies, frameworks, specifications, and reference designs in areas such as photonics R&D, distributed computing, use cases, and best practices.
Details on IOWN Global Forum and membership information can be found at https://iowngf.org.
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