What is ISSIP?

[CathyWon]

ISSIP, pronounced iZip, stands for the International Society of Service Innovation Professionals. It is a professional association co-founded by IBM, Cisco, HP, and many Universities with a mission to promote services related innovation for the interconnected world. The organization's purpose is to build a bridge between corporations, institutions, and individuals to grow and develop the global service economy.

Ulf Vinneras, Sr. Director of Professional Services at HPE Aruba, was recently appointed as the Vice President of ISSIP. At HPE Aruba, Ulf leads the Aruba NaaS service, which is part of the HPE GreenLake for Aruba program. I got a chance to sit down with Ulf to understand a little more about ISSIP and the journey he is embarking on in his new role.

Cathy: The main objective of the organization is quite a huge initiative. How often do members meet and how would you describe the specific objectives for ISSIP?

Ulf: ISSIP is a very active non-profit organization, with activities happening weekly. The main focus of ISSIP is to build a bridge between corporations, universities, and individual members. ISSIP also works closely with the National Science Foundation http://www.nsf.gov in the area of service-related innovations. The organization is unique through the broad mix of members, including a blend of corporate employees, executives, students (college graduates and post-graduates), and university institutions.

ISSIP brings thought leaders from the industry and the academic world to look specifically at innovation in the technical service industry, with automation and analytics as main drivers. ISSIP uses this unique position to develop and define future education for K-12 and University programs about innovative services and service offerings.

Historically, ISSIP has arranged an annual conference with a deep dive on selected subjects. The organization manages its objectives through workgroups in many different areas, including remote work, service automation and analytics, and service innovation. The workgroups also arrange speaker series on relevant topics affecting the service ecosystem.

Cathy: What are some of the main issues the organization sees developing today?

Ulf: One current trend we see evolving in the area of Service Innovation is the XaaS business. Software and Datacenter as a Service have been around for quite some time. Those offerings are pretty well defined. However, looking at Networking as a Service, NaaS, there are a few strong players in the market, and more vendors are joining in. When you look at NaaS, there is a challenge with the definition and standards. Today we see an increasing demand from customers for NaaS, but it is hard for customers to compare and select between different offers without a clearly defined standard.

The current pandemic has introduced new dynamics that have impacted everything, from supply chain to remote work to education and many other areas of impact on our daily lives. In fact, due to COVID-19, this year's ISSIP annual conference has been converted into a series of virtual workshops. 

The first of these workshops is scheduled for Tuesday, November 17th, and focuses on lessons learned from Covid19 thus far. Anyone can register for the session, Future of Work: Building Resilient Supply Chains, Lessons Learned from COVID-19. Subsequently, the second event, scheduled for December 10th, continues with the topic Future of Work & Learning: New opportunities/challenges/ requirements in remote working and learning

It's an exciting year ahead for ISSIP!

Thank you, Ulf, for helping us to understand a bit more about ISSIP! 

Don't forget to register for these events to learn more!