Ling Chen, senior project manager at Microsoft (China) and AllSeen Alliance member, represented the AllJoyn® project with a speaking engagement at the recent IoT Asia 2016 conference in Singapore.
Chen works at the Open Technology Center at Microsoft, where his responsibilities include promoting open-source IoT technologies, open data interface standards of OData in Chinese standardization and application, and the construction and implementation of open government data platforms and applications. He joined Microsoft in May 2012 and is currently a member of the Chinese Communications Standards Association (CCSA) and the National Committee for Standardization (NITS) in cloud computing, Web/HTML5, and big data standards.
Tell us about IoT Asia 2016. What were your key takeaways from the show?
The keynotes and panel discussions were received with strong support from the Singapore government and the “Smart Nation” Gov initiative. I also observed both a strong interest and concern from the Singapore government regarding the IoT industry. IoT industry leads like Advantech, Microsoft, ST, MTK, Oracle, and Intel demonstrated their IoT solutions, with Smart Home getting the most attention and support.
What was your participation at IoT Asia?
I participated in a fireside panel discussion on March 30 titled, “Getting to Deployment – Overcoming the Grand Challenges,” hosted by panel moderator Bob Gill, general manager of ARC Advisory Group in Singapore, and joined by Chris Wood, CTO and Founder of Xped, Jorey Guzman, director of product management factory Automation, and Casey Taninguchi, general manager of the Corporate Strategy Division for Yokogawa Electric Corporation. We discussed the frameworks for evolving in a hyper-connected world.
The session was well-attended with an estimated 500 people who were following three IoT Asia tracks, including Smart Cities, Industrial IoT, and Design Applications. The audience was mostly from the business side, seeking to understand the big-picture value potential to be derived from IoT and how to deploy IoT solutions, like AllJoyn, to gain a competitive advantage.
What key point did you make in the panel?
In the discussion about the biggest challenges the IoT faces, I discussed ROI with the group and how to determine whether an IoT application will bring real business value to the industry. Interoperability is critical for ensuring the success of the IoT industry, and it’s exciting to see AllJoyn bringing that seamless interoperability to the smart home industry.
There are plenty of successful use cases across the various IoT verticals that are driving the IoT market forward. I illustrated the following:
- Wearable devices: In China, tens of millions of smart bracelets are sold every year.
- Government smart city initiatives: Sensor technology mitigates air pollution and noise.
- Low-Power Wide-Area Network: LPWANs enable a wide range of M2M and IoT applications at a lower cost and longer range.
I enjoyed my two days representing AllSeen Alliance at IoT Asia.
