The Association is now coming up with a "launching coalition", the IDS Launching Coalition. The IDS Launching Coalition is a group of 31 IDSA member companies that will intensify their engagement within the IDS initiative to implement and certify 15 use cases by September 2020. This process was initiated with the kick-off meeting on March 6 - a meeting that allowed all Launching Coalition participants to get to know the organizational environment, tasks and tools and to foster collaboration and networking.

The IDS Launching Coalition aims to be the first IDS-based products to go live on the market in their respective domains. According to the Association, this is not the first, but the decisive step towards finally establishing the first commercial IDS ecosystem based on trust and data sovereignty. The introduction of commercial IDS-based solutions should enable data providers from various sectors to monetize their data treasures while retaining sovereignty over their data.

Results go into the rule book

The Launching Coalition members will work together to solve the technical, legal and business challenges they will face when implementing their IDS-based products. The IDSA will support the coalition to achieve the goal of launching IDS-based products in September 2020, be it through workshops to create business models or support in the implementation process of IDS connectors and, of course, by documenting the most important results in the so-called Rule Book. This rule book is intended to serve as a guide, not only for the Launching Coalition, but also for those companies that want to pursue and implement IDS-based products themselves. Interim results will also be presented at the Hannover Messe.

IDS officially a standard

DIN SPEC 27070 "Requirements and reference architecture of a security gateway for the exchange of industrial data and services" was published in February. Sebastian Steinbuss, CTO of IDSA, on the publication: "As a supplement to the IDS reference architecture, the publication of the DIN SPEC represents a major milestone on the way to secure cross-company exchange of industrial manufacturing data. The next step is to turn this DIN SPEC into an international standard - an ISO standard."