The LoRa Alliance plans to expand its presence in key industries, including smart metering and massive IoT deployments.

To achieve this, it has appointed Alper Yegin as CEO and Semtech’s Olivier Beaujard as board chair. Additionally, Birdz’s Ahmed Kasttet has joined the board, bringing expertise in large-scale metering deployments.

Over the past nine years, the LoRa Alliance has gone through two major development phases in its history. The first was a start-up phase focused primarily on developing the LoRaWan specification and the formation of the LoRa Alliance organisation. The second phase was focused on building out the alliance’s organisational structure and maturity, formalising its processes and procedures, and building visibility for LoRaWan.

The alliance is now on its third phase as LoRaWan moves into hyperscaling, aka the hockey stick ramp. The alliance is bringing in fresh leadership to support this phase of development. With several large enterprise brands having already rolled out services using LoRaWan and network availability at an all-time high globally with terrestrial, community and NTN satellite options, paired with a robust LoRaWan end-device ecosystem, the forecast growth trajectory is very strong.

“As we conducted our search, we looked for a leader with the skills and experience to guide the alliance as LoRaWan hyperscaling accelerates,” said Zenner’s Rich Sanders on behalf of the search committee. “Alper stood out among the candidates due to his strong contributions to the development of LoRaWan technology and deep knowledge of the market and customer requirements. Alper has been a key driver of LoRaWan’s success, including eight years as chair of the technical committee and six years as alliance vice chair, in addition to 25 years of experience with wireless communication standards and alliance leadership, including the IETF, 3GPP, ETSI and the Zigbee Alliance. The board is confident that Alper has the vision and leadership to guide the alliance through this period of rapid growth as massive IoT takes off.”

Alper Yegin added: “Through my position at Actility, where I was intimately involved in LoRaWan technology and new product development, marketing, business development and hands-on deployment support – and my active leadership role in the alliance over the past eight years – I am ready to embrace the challenges and opportunities facing us as we enter this new phase. I firmly believe that LoRaWan is the strongest LPWAN technology in the market, and the only one that is truly able to support massive IoT today. The standard’s maturity, advanced and diverse feature set, comprehensive certification programme and tremendous global ecosystem differentiate LoRaWan from other technologies. I look forward to collaborating with Olivier in his new role as chair as well as the full board of directors to maintain LoRaWan’s position as the leading LPWAN technology.”

The LoRa Alliance also announced that it is changing its operating structure and adopting the industry best practice of separating the CEO and board chair roles. As the alliance is maturing and its work is accelerating, the new structure will drive efficiencies and accountability, with the CEO responsible for providing leadership and guiding the alliance’s day-to-day operations while the board chair and board of directors provide oversight and governance. Semtech’s Olivier Beaujard has been elected to serve as board chair for the first one-year term.

“I feel honoured to become board chair of the LoRa Alliance, and I am eager to closely collaborate with Alper to bring the LoRa Alliance and its strong ecosystem to the next level,” said Beaujard.

In addition to these leadership changes, the alliance also announced that Birdz’s Ahmed Kasttet has joined the board of directors. Birdz brings 25 years of experience operating radio networks to its parent company, Veolia, a global water utility, to enable the operation of a large LoRaWan water metering deployment. He was also integral to the alliance’s efforts to develop M-Bus over LPWAN and OMS over LoRaWan.

“The LoRaWan market is significant and strong growth is expected for unlicensed spectrum technologies,” said Kasttet. “Joining the board is a tremendous opportunity to share my expertise in smart metering, the fastest-growing sector for LoRaWan deployments. It also offers me the opportunity to increase representation of end-device manufacturers and utilities, as well as bring the voice of end-customers to the alliance’s leadership.”

Yegin added: “The board of directors looks forward to Ahmed’s contributions to the alliance at the board level, as he represents a critical sector for LoRaWan deployments. Birdz’s deployments and successes serve as a gold standard use case, and their success has helped to accelerate LoRaWan adoption. His familiarity with and contributions to the standard, metering deployments and the utilities market will bring an invaluable perspective to our work.”

Formed in 2015, the LoRa Alliance (lora-alliance.org) is an open, non-profit association.