5G and IoT with Jim Brisimitzis, General Partner, 5G Open Innovation Labs

Connectivity is a critical component of IoT and Industry 4.0, enabling companies to collect, send, and analyze data from IoT endpoints to maximize the productivity and operational efficiency of every device and the environment that they operate in. Connectivity solutions need to cost-effectively support billions of devices, shift vast amounts of data with low latency and energy consumption. Fifth-generation (5G) cellular/mobile networks are expected to provide all of this globally, enabling many new IoT-enabled solutions across every industry and job.

For this meetup, we’re partnering with the Washington State IoT Council to host Jim Brisimitzis, General Partner, 5G Open Innovation Labs for this meetup. The 5G Open Innovation Lab is working with a global ecosystem of developers, startups, enterprises, academia, and government institutions to fuel the development of new 5G capabilities, use cases, and market categories. The Lab provides developers access to open platforms, enterprises, and markets needed to create, test, and deploy new use cases and innovations for 5G across industries. Industries of interest include Manufacturing, Transportation & Logistics, Autonomous Vehicles, Energy Utility, Media & Entertainment, and Space & Satellite.

Jim has over 19 years of enterprise, channel, and startup experience through Bell Canada, Nortel Networks, PeopleSoft, Oracle, and more than 13 decades with Microsoft. Jim is the Founder of the 5G Open Innovation Lab in Seattle. The Lab is a community partnership of private and public sponsors focused on discovering, accelerating, and promoting future 5G inspired used cases and innovation. Before launching the Lab, Jim was a Managing Partner for Quake Capital, leading their early efforts to establish a presence in the ecosystem. Jim was also the General Manager of the Microsoft for Startups program in the United States and Canada. His team was responsible for startup engagements partnering with leading North American startup accelerators/incubators. Together with these partners, Jim’s team engaged over 2,800 startups actively running on Azure through programs such as the Customer Access Program (CAP), technical enablement, and events to help startups accelerate their business. Before launching the Microsoft for Startups program. Jim led operations for Microsoft Ventures globally and created and launched their “HiPo” program, an exclusive engagement for Startups with significant market potential.

Jim has led many internal innovation efforts from SMB mini-servers to hyper-scale computing HW/SW stacks. As an “intrapreneur,” Jim appeals to opportunities that help a large organization rapidly innovate new and emerging opportunities from concept to customer adoption. He developed the early prototypes for Microsoft Cloud Platform Solution (aka Azure Stack) and holds a patent for a predictive algorithm. He holds a degree in Business Management from Trent University of Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. Jim and his family reside in Seattle, WA.