Groupe Azure: Clemens Vasters in Montreal!

Systems Federation and Integration across Cloud, Fog, and Edge

“Hybrid cloud” commonly describes how systems can be run with a combination of on-premises and public cloud assets, and how those systems can be integrated. This perspective is, however, largely constrained to data-center like assets, and typically to the scope of one organization.

We will discuss how Microsoft sees this concept evolving into broadly federated systems that span different participating organizations, span private and public datacenters, and include intelligence at the system edge, inside traditional IT equipment as well as in consumer and industrial equipment. To illustrate the concept, we will lean on examples from the industrial automation realm, where this transformation is in full swing.

The OPC Foundation's Unified Architecture has emerged as the clear winner for horizontal integration of production environments and vertical integration of such environments with their attached IT systems. We will discuss the next set of challenges that lie ahead given this common foundation: Each production line may have dozens of different stakeholders, from sensor to system, who each want to provide predictive-maintenance, remote-management, or X-as-a-service within that one production line as their “Industry 4.0” business objective. How does a sensor manufacturer get access to what telemetry from their product inside a component that is part of a machine installed in a production line? And through what path might they make a machine-learned optimizing correction?

Conférencier: Clemens Vasters

Clemens Vasters is Microsoft's "Principal Messenger", driving global technical strategy for Microsoft's Azure Messaging platform services: Azure Service Bus, Azure Event Hubs, and Azure Relay. He is also playing a key role in Microsoft's technical engagements in various standardization bodies and industry consortia, like OASIS and OpenFog. In the OPC Foundation, he is a member of the OPC UA Working Group and has been a key contributor to the architecture of OPC UA PubSub for the last several years; he also sits on the OPC Foundation's Technical Advisory Committee. Clemens has been working on the Azure platform from the earliest incubation projects, accumulating over ten years of experience in building cloud-scale commercial platform services.