Technology Leaders Will Convene to Accelerate the Evolution of the Internet and Enable the Next Generation of Human Experiences 

AUSTIN and PALO ALTO, Calif. – April 14, 2021 – Vapor IO and VMware today announced the Open Grid Alliance (OGA), an industry alliance that will define and accelerate the Open Grid, an evolutionary rearchitecting of the Internet. Dell Technologies, DriveNets, MobiledgeX, and PacketFabric will join Vapor IO and VMware as founding members. The alliance will work to evolve the Internet to be a global, shared platform that distributes compute, data, and intelligence to when and where it’s needed, on demand.

“The Internet was built from the core out. Now we need to rebuild it from the edge in,” said Cole Crawford, founder and CEO of edge infrastructure company Vapor IO. “The alliance will accelerate a decades-long journey of innovation at all levels of the stack, from fiber optics to workload automation. We want to align thought leaders, technologies and investments to bring forth applications that simply cannot be delivered on the Internet we have today. The Open Grid is for everybody; it will only emerge from deep industry collaborations, and that’s why we formed the Open Grid Alliance.” 

The OGA will include leaders from myriad industries and disciplines, leveraging domain expertise that spans the entire stack, encompassing the physical infrastructure as well as the software-driven networking, virtualization, automation, and application layers. Working groups will provide a platform for these voices to present ideas, facilitate discussions, and offer suggestions. In addition, the organization will serve as an educational resource and knowledge hub for future Open Grid technologies and innovations. 

“As human experiences evolve from basic content consumption to real-time immersive collaboration, we see the Internet evolving toward a compute grid and eventually, an intelligence grid. This evolution will enable highly-interactive intelligence applications to be distributed around the globe, on demand,” said Kaniz Mahdi, vice president of advanced technologies, VMware. “We’ve never built something of this scale, and it will require bridging of disparate technologies with multiple levels of abstraction. This will only be possible with a deeper level of collaboration across wireless, cloud, and networking industries.” 

As part of its charter, the OGA will embrace technologies that distribute the economics and flexibility of the cloud through the network edge all the way to end users, making it possible to build new classes of applications that support billions of intelligent devices, the data that they generate, and the new networking infrastructure that underpins their seamless operation.

The OGA will define key principles for the Open Grid and identify interoperable technologies that adhere to those principles. It will document how these technologies will impact cloud providers, developers, vendors, communication service providers (CSPs), internet service providers (ISPs), and end users. The OGA will promote collaboration and open architectures that will enable the dynamic geo-distribution of workloads.

“The business of the internet has been the greatest predictor of value creation in our digital economy and created a whole new way of doing business. It removed geographic barriers and changed the way we connect,” said Vish Nandlall, vice president, Technology Strategy and Ecosystems for Dell Technologies.  “As a founding member of the OGA, Dell Technologies sees this as an opportunity to deliver an edge internet tier to tackle the unprecedented innovation taking place today, extend its reach of the internet and drive greater innovation in areas such as intelligent connected vehicles, smart cities, industry 4.0, and connected healthcare.” 

“New immersive technologies, interactive applications, and industry 4.0 solutions present a new challenge to the way applications meet subscribers in infinite locations. It requires network functions to be distributed across the connectivity grid at a high elasticity and scale,” said Ido Susan, CEO of DriveNets. “DriveNets disrupted networking by building networks like cloud. We are now excited to extend this work by teaming up with this great group of visionaries and form the Open Grid Alliance to rearchitect the Internet.”

"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," said Jason Hoffman, CEO of MobiledgeX. "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."

“We believe connectivity should be democratized and automated,” said Dave Ward, CEO of PacketFabric. “An Open Grid will incorporate the latest in network automation to deliver applications where and when they're needed. The ability to provision network routes on demand will play a critical role. We're proud to support the Open Grid Alliance in its efforts to bring together multiple industries to architect the most affordable infrastructure that connects users and devices to clouds and private network interconnections."  

Support for Open Grid Alliance

“A world of one trillion intelligent devices means compute is more heterogeneous and diverse than ever before, underscoring the need for software and silicon solutions that address the full scope of challenges from edge to cloud,” said Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of product solutions, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “We remain committed to working with the industry, through initiatives like Project Cassini and Platform Security Architecture, to help standardize a secure, cloud-native approach to edge computing.”

“Crown Castle’s industry expertise, along with its land and fiber at the edge, will play an important role in modernizing the internet,” said Paul Reddick, vice president of strategy, business and product development at Crown Castle. “We support the Open Grid Alliance's efforts to organize an ecosystem that brings this about.”

To increase the diversity of viewpoints, the Open Grid Alliance welcomes members from the technology industry, academia, and public institutions. To find out more about joining the OGA, visit the organization’s website: www.opengridalliance.org 

Additional Resources

• Read The Open Grid Manifesto
• Read a perspective on the announcement from Vapor IO’s Cole Crawford in this blog post 
• Read a perspective on the announcement from VMware’s Kaniz Mahdi in this blog post 
• Follow @OpenGridAllianc on Twitter

About Open Grid Alliance

The 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. Founding Open Grid Alliance members include 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. If you have an interest in participating in upcoming reports or submitting a guest post to the Open Grid Alliance Blog, feel free to reach out by emailing info@opengridalliance.org.

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