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

PALO ALTO, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — November 4, 2021 — 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.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20211104005667/en/

The 34 Founding Member organizations that currently comprise the OGA represent multiple industries, disciplines, and institutions. (Graphic: Business Wire)

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)