Telefónica Public Policy & Telefónica España Regulatory teams
Atos, Engineering, Orange and Telefónica, the members of the FIWARE Core Industry group, announced at the Mobile World Congress the creation of the FIWARE Foundation.
FIWARE is a rich and versatile suite of standardised software components that can be used as the basis for creating advanced Internet services and apps faster and at lower cost. It is one of the results of the EU’s Public-Private Partnership on the Future Internet. FIWARE was ‘born in Europe’ and is now being globally adopted. It is today a vibrant community of more than 5,000 people from industry, SMEs and startups, from developers and user community in business and the public sector.
FIWARE Foundation will support open standards championing the way forward on behalf of the much larger FIWARE community. The Foundation will ensure the long-term availability of FIWARE for users, for free and forever. The Foundation will engage with the open-source developer community and ensure that FIWARE stays at the forefront of technological trends. Connecting startups, SMEs and industry through FIWARE implementations, the foundation will initially focus on three important domains for Europe:
- Making Europe’s manufacturing industry base more digital,
- Turning cities into truly smart places
- Better management of how we grow, process, transport and consume the excellent food we enjoy in Europe.
The four companies that announced last year their commitment for the adoption of FIWARE in the domain of Smart Cities are now announcing their plans to bring FIWARE to other domains like Smart Industry or Smart Agrifood. In a recent document titled “The Next Digital Revolution in Industry: the FIWARE Perspective”, the companies stated that FIWARE has been vanguard in how Cloud, IoT, real-time context information processing and BigData analysis technologies can be integrated together to be the starting point for an emerging Digital Industry platform ecosystem, breaking down the borders for creating a digital single market.
Roberto Viola, Director General of DG Connect at the European Commission, said after the announcement of the launch of the FIWARE Foundation that he is “really pleased to see that our [their] investment in the Future Internet Public-Private Partnership paid off so well. The creation of the foundation confirms industry’s commitment to FIWARE’s future and openness. I expect the FIWARE community to contribute to the Commission’s work to build a digital single market”.
The European Commission will continue supporting FIWARE through its Horizon 2020 research and innovation framework programme. What is more, under the EU Digital Single Market, FIWARE will decisively contribute to the vision of Digital as a driver for growth by means of creating an open innovation-driven ecosystem where public and private organizations, including academia and research centers as well as SMEs, particularly startups, can join forces towards the creation of new digital products and services.
Following you can find the EC press reference welcoming the creation of the FIWARE Foundation:
FIWARE comes as an opportunity to materialize actions identified within the EU Digital Single Market Strategy as well as the collaboration with other countries and regions across the globe. The Mexico-EU collaboration on ICT or the EU-US collaboration on standardization are good examples of this.
On the other hand, the FIWARE Accelerator program has demonstrated how innovative SMEs and startups, with the right enablers like those brought by FIWARE, can build IoT-enabled solutions and introduce great improvements in business processes across several sectors.
Within the scope of Smart Cities, FIWARE continues to progress towards becoming the platform which integrates the standards of many cities around the world. The OASC (Open and Agile Smart Cities) initiative has decided to adopt it in order to facilitate the development of portable and interoperable solutions. The initiative has already gained the support from 75 cities in more than 15 different countries in 2015 and a fourth wave of cities has been announced at the Smart Cities World Congress in Puebla (Mexico), reaching a total of 89 cities in 19 countries. This multi-country adoption underlines the importance of FIWARE as an international information hub, which is particularly relevant for sectors such as smart industry, smart cities or agrifood – where there is a need to connect services across multiple territories and exchange valuable data enabled by the new wave of smart digital services. In this respect, FIWARE is Candidate as the Industry Data platform for the recently announced European Initiative: Digitizing European Industry.
The FIWARE Core Industry Group are running conversations with other companies and end users willing to join the FIWARE initiative and support the FIWARE Foundation. A FIWARE Foundation “Founders event” will be held in June 2016 in Vienna to confirm their incorporation and propose a platform for discussions and collaboration of the industry.
