Making Connectivity A Utility Through The OGA

‍Richard Piasentin, Chief Marketing & Chief Strategy Officer at Accedian

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The OGA is heavily focused on reimagining the Internet. How do you envision the Internet evolving over the next 10 years?

The current Internet changed people's lives everywhere. It enabled new business models and the whole construct of disruption was created by this idea of universal connectivity. But, the current Internet is the opposite of inclusive, and today, is the opposite of efficient. Over the next ten years, I believe we’ll see a decentralization and democratization of function. We will see the emergence of an efficient open marketplace that allows individuals, corporations and organizations with consumption needs to buy resources, as needed and on demand, in real-time. This will make our daily lives more cost effective, more accessible, and, most importantly, more independent when it comes to connectivity.

As a society, we’re built and heavily reliant on digital services. What are some of the new applications you see emerging, and how does the Internet need to evolve to meet those?  

Augmented reality (AR) comes to mind first. Most of us have digital expressions of ourselves at this point, and the potential within the augmented reality space - far past just the gaming space - is incredible. It’s going to create an inevitable convergence of our real world with the digital world. From a connectivity perspective, that evolution means we require not only better, but stringently reliable performance. If you're doing anything in somebody's visual field, like you are with AR/VR, you need round trip delays of less than 20 milliseconds or the optics will be choppy. Talk about a problematic user experience! But 20 milliseconds is not a long time, and you can’t do this with traditional data centers of course. A key part of this evolution is compute itself, and to reach the customer experience levels needed, it has to be democratized and distributed.

How does your company’s mission and services fit with the Open Grid Alliance? Why are you passionate about the Grid?

I believe connectivity is a utility - it's like water at this point. Connectivity to the global marketplace needs to be universal. Nobody should not be connected, and I believe the OGA can help to achieve this. As a company, Accedian is obsessed with assuring the best possible experience for end-users, and we were drawn to The Open Grid Alliance’s mission to enable collaboration and reimagine the Internet. It's time to wrest control of this tool that is important to all of us - the parallel and ubiquitous processing that enables our digital lives. 

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About Richard Piasentin, Chief Marketing & Chief Strategy Officer, Accedian

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As Chief Marketing and Chief Strategy Officer at Accedian, Richard is responsible for Accedian's strategic planning process and investment priorities, the creation and development of consistent brand communications and marketing strategy, and Accedian's commercialization efforts in the areas of global product pricing, solution marketing, and business development.

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Richard began his career at Nortel Networks in 1992 as a test engineer for their public carrier switching division. From there, he segued into focusing on the wireless industry, taking on a variety of senior roles at Nortel within sales, operations, and supply chain during his 17 years at the company. After Nortel, he was vice president and general manager for BlackBerry’s North American business, and general manager of Viavi’s Visibility, Intelligence and Analytics (VIA) business unit.

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He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering, RF specialization, from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.

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