Michael Hathaway

Co-Founder
Windmill

Open Ecosystems & Blockchain Accelerate Digital Infrastructure in Smart Cities

The software and systems choices cities and their partners make when designing and rolling out smart infrastructure have short and long-term consequences. Given the importance to balance economics and outcomes, security and efficiency, sensors and systems – and given the fragmentation that has caused the Internet of Things to not yet reach its true potential – building sustainable sense into the architecture is key to the success of every project.
Implementing and managing everything connected at the very edge of the network is hard, particularly given the natural scale of large infrastructure and digital infrastructure projects. It has to be well-thought out in advance, tested, and developed in such a way that multiple systems and clouds can talk to each other, without creating security vulnerabilities in the “fabric” that will be woven together to support modern, sustainable cities.
Understanding and governing the ownership and exchange of valuable data is also challenging, and fundmental not only to the efficient operations of connected cities but to the business models and innovations in funding including risk and revenue sharing across public and private entities, and coordination between local, state and federal agencies.
Building open ecosystems is less expensive, less risky and more flexible than approaches that can bring vendor lock-ins and unanticipated expenses and weaknesses. Leveraging enterprise-level blockchain for effective data sharing, access management, transaction and application security – in concert with open technology frameworks – is making the intersection of physical and digital infrastructure advancements more possible and practical than ever.
Philip des Autels, Chief Product Officer of DeviceTone and co-founder of the Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry, together with Michael Hathaway, co-founder of Windmill Enterprise for the advancement of open-source blockchain platforms, will deliver their “contrarian views” to attendees at the Smart City Works Infrastructure Week event May 15, in Washington DC.
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About Michael

Mr. Hathaway’s career has placed him in the vortex of multiple electronic revolutions. In his early career, he worked with pioneers in electronic music and digital audio. After developing a line of affordable digital audio products at Lexicon (acquired by Harmon Industries), he transitioned to the networking sector. He was a technical contributor during early days of Ethernet and ATM network switches, culminating in developing the first gigabit capable Internet packet forwarding engine for a DARPA project while working at BBN. He was a founder and executive at the pioneering terabit Internet router startup, Ironbridge Networks and CTO at network processor startup Agere (acquired by Lucent Micro). Since 2003, after a short stint working with Venture Capitalists, he set his sights on developing a signaling and messaging layer to facilitate secure transactions over the public Internet. After 10 years of applying his architecture principals across multiple consulting projects, he founded Information Xchange (IX) and developed the Tensor-Connect platform based on his architectural principals. This lightweight information management platform assigns tokens to users and software applications, providing parameter level access permissions to Internet accessible data. Tensor Connect establishes ownership of network connected assets and information, enabling the owner to share information with applications, services and stakeholders in multi-enterprise and smart city applications. With Blockchain now reaching a level of maturity to support Enterprise applications, he is spearheading the incorporation of Blockchain into Tensor-Connect. He believes the incorporation of Blockchain into Enterprise data security to be the foundation of yet another electronic revolution.