News

OSGi Alliance Names IBM as a Sponsor of Its 2004 World Congress; Platinum-Level Support Announced for October Event in Barcelona, Spain (7/7/2004)

The OSGi Alliance today announced IBM as a Platinum Sponsor of the OSGi Alliance 2004 World Congress. IBM has been actively involved with the OSGi Alliance from its inception in 1999 at both the Board of Directors and technical expert group levels and has provided strategically significant contributions to the OSGi Service Platform.

The OSGi Alliance 2004 World Congress will draw the world's top experts on commercially available and developing OSGi implementations, offering focused tracks for the mobile, automotive and home markets as promised by its theme, "Convergence: Going Mobile, Driving, and Staying Home with OSGi Solutions." The Congress will be held at the Hilton Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain on October 11-15, 2004, and on-line registration is currently open.

"As devices grow in computing power, handheld computers, PDAs, consumer appliances, and even automobiles start performing functions that used to be limited to PCs and laptops. This means that standards and interoperability are more crucial than ever," said Craig Hayman, Vice President Development, IBM Pervasive Computing Division. "IBM has been involved with the OSGi Alliance from the start, driving the various releases of the specification and working with the industry to advance the OSGi Alliance and its mission."

This is the third year of Platinum Sponsorship for IBM, and highlights the strategic significance that IBM places on the OSGi Alliance to drive convergence of applications and services in the mobile, automotive and digital home markets. The annual World Congress is an open-to-the-public conference featuring pre- and post-event workshops, exhibitions, keynote presentations and breakout seminars targeted at experts and novices alike. Agenda sessions will illustrate the benefits of the OSGi Service Platform for end-users, network operators, and manufacturers and focus on how to easily deploy, provision, maintain, and manage applications and services to wired and wireless networked devices.

"We're very pleased to have such a prominent company as IBM as a major sponsor," said Dr. John Barr, President of the OSGi Alliance. "The acceptance of the OSGi Service Platform has exploded over the last year, with framework developers, device manufacturers, and service providers releasing OSGi enabled products and services in many markets."

Building on last year's highly successful Congress in Dusseldorf, Germany, the OSGi Alliance recently formed a Mobile Expert Group (MEG), to define the requirements and specifications to tailor and extend the OSGi Service Platform for mobile devices. The 2004 World Congress will provide an inside look at the work being performed within the OSGi Alliance by its members to create device middleware solutions for the mobile industry.

The event is being produced for the OSGi Alliance by Global Inventures.

www.osgiworldcongress.com