Although PICMG is based in the USA, it truly is a global organization.  In fact, the breakdown of membership is fairly evenly distributed.   With all of the current PICMG officers located in the USA, we have made an effort to reach out to our Europe and Asian members.  In March, we met with dozens and European and other vendors at Embedded World to address the views, strategic roadmaps, and concerns of our members.  Last month, I was privileged to visit members in Taiwan, Japan, and China.  My trip included Medical and Design shows in Taiwan and Japan as well as Industrial Automation and Telecom shows in China.  The members had excellent ideas to continue to improve and enhance existing specifications.  It was also very beneficial to understand the local needs of each market.   Stay tuned in the coming months for changes to address those needs.

Other efforts included solidifying a barter agreement with a key embedded trade show supplier in Japan and “evangelizing” both PICMG and our members’ products.  There was often true excitement from the potential users in seeing the new PICMG Overview Brochure  and my pointing to the multiple vendors in their country from the Executive Members list.  (This is another benefit of being an Exec Member, we didn’t have space to list everyone, so the Execs are printed on the brochure!)

A key topic during the Asia trip was our Industrial IoT initiative.  PICMG has been exploring interest in a specification and have been having open, informal discussions with several members and key contacts at the Industrial IoT Consortium (IoT), Fog Computing, Flexible Factory Project, contacts at Intel and Cisco, and some specialists in IoT security.  If you are exploring IoT products, I highly recommend you join the calls, which are open.  But note, we are hoping to transition to the new specification phase soon.

If you have any questions on PICMG’s global activities, feel free to contact us at [email protected]

Justin Moll

Vice President of Marketing

PICMG

It is my great pleasure to announce a new PICMG program honoring key contributors to PICMG growth and success. Accumulating more than 23 years of Open Standards development for Embedded Computing, PICMG members have collaborated on nine major families of specifications. Hundreds of people have participated in subcommittees, providing key contributions which have led to billions of dollars of computing solutions.

As Embedded Computing changes and people move to new phases of their careers, the Officers felt it was important to acknowledge the many members, both active and inactive, who have been instrumental in the development and leadership of PICMG. For our first year of the program, we selected a large and deserving group as our initial honorees, reflecting the quantity of contributions that drive PICMG’s leadership in the industry. This proficient group contains founding members, leaders of previous successful efforts, and current initiative leaders.

Through the end of 2017, we will highlight honorees in this distinguished group, with information about their valuable contributions and accomplishments by publishing monthly articles in our newsletter and on our website. We will also establish a process to nominate future honorees.

I would like to personally thank all of them for their contributions to our 23 years of success.

Dennis Aldridge
Curt Alexander
Alan Beverly
Steve Cooper
Rob Davidson
Chris Engels
Wayne Fisher
Lou Francz
Chuck Hill
Jerry Hitchcock
Roger Hurlbert
Andreas Lenkish
Pierre McMaster
Jim Medeiros
Mark Overgaard
Joe Pavlat
Dan Pirro
Dick Somes
Bob Sullivan
Eike Waltz

Active Member Honorees:

Kevin Bross
Chuck Byers
Heiko Korte
Ray Larsen
Jeff Munch
Michael Munroe
Bob Pebly
Doug Sandy
Manfred Schmitz
Michael Thompson

The Embedded Tech Trends (ETT) media event was held in New Orleans last week and it should come as no surprise that the event was very well attended!  The quality of the presentations and media interaction was superb.  Three of the PICMG officers were in attendance.  With the new PICMG leadership, there were very important messages we wanted to convey to our colleagues in attendance.

1. Activity & presence

We intend for PICMG to be much more active and be more vocal about our efforts.  There are a lot of hidden gems and hot spots of activity for the various PICMG specifications.  We want all of you to hear about the successes, the trends, and the upcoming efforts in the community.

2. Work more closely with the publications & our members

The PICMG leadership wants to work closely with all of the various publications across the electronics spectrum.  Do you know of a new program using a PICMG technology?  Let us know and when appropriate we will help spread the word!

3. Closer communication with VITA and other groups

Jess Isquith and I spoke with VITA’s Jerry Gipper about closer collaboration between the groups.  With significant overlap of members and many of the same goals, it makes sense for the two organizations to explore areas of collaboration for mutual benefit.

4. PICMG – Commercial | Industrial | Rugged

You may notice PICMG using these words — Commercial, Industrial, Rugged.   While VITA is almost completely Mil/Aero, we want to remind the industry that PICMG is well diversified in Industrial, Transportation, Mil/Aero, Medical, Physics/Research, Energy, Communications, and many other industries.

5. We are Rugged too

With the incredible success of the xTCA specifications in Communications, many in the industry forget that PICMG has very rugged implementations of CompactPCI/Serial, AdvancedTCA, MicroTCA, PICMG 1.3, and COM Express.  CompactPCI Serial for Space and Rugged COM Express are on the way.  Let’s not forget that its CompactPCI on the Mars Rover over 225 million kilometers away.

We at PICMG look forward to many exciting advances to come in 2017 and beyond.

Justin Moll, VP of Marketing