After its strongest growth year ever, the IoT M2M Council (IMC) has tapped Romil Bahl, CEO of KORE, as its new chairman. In addition, Sam Colley, CEO of Pod Group, a Giesecke+Devrient company, will be vice chairman.

The IMC is the largest trade association serving the IoT sector, with over 25,000 rank-and-file adopter members, and its list of sustaining member companies grew to over 30 in 2021, largely due to the success of its online events.

“The plan is to keep our momentum going by developing new ways for our sustainers to get even deeper interaction with adopters,” said Bahl, whose company KORE was recently listed on the NY Stock Exchange. “The IoT ecosystem should expect to see continued expansion of our IMC event portfolio, creative outreach programmes, and production of content that is absolutely required for people deploying IoT technology. We achieved what we wanted to last year and we have even greater aspirations for 2022.”

The IMC is just off its IoT Week @ CES event that included a large pavilion, conference programming, press events and networking events at the Consumer Electronics Show in early January. A similar programme is scheduled for the group’s Industrial IoT Week at the world’s largest manufacturing show – Hannover Messe in Germany – for the end of May.

IMC’s standing programmes for IoT adopters include template RFPs, an online library of use-cases, and a calculator that assesses the user’s readiness for IoT technology. IMC’s board of sustaining companies gets access to its rank-and-file adopter membership for purposes of thought leadership, lead generation, promotion and research.

“We’re evaluating an expansion of our adopter member base, entirely new levels of membership aimed at IoT influencers, and perhaps even a foray into the realm of public policy,” said Bahl, who served as the IMC vice chairman in 2021. “The US government intends to spend a trillion dollars on infrastructure and we believe a lot of that will require IoT technology. The IMC intends to have a seat at the table.

The IMC is the largest trade group dedicated to the global IoT and M2M sector, with over 25,000 IoT enterprise users, product makers, designers and apps developers that buy IoT products and services as members.

Board companies include Aeris, AVSystem, BeamLive, BICS, Blues Wireless, Digi International, Fibocom, FloLive, Ground Control, Gurtam, iBasis, Ignion, Incognito, IoT Launch, Keyfactor, KORE, Losant, Microsoft Azure, MultiTech, NimbeLink, Novotech, Pelion Technology, Pod Group, Quectel, RevX Systems, Software AG, Somos, Taoglas, Tata Communications, Telit, Utimaco and Vodafone.