Stephen Berard
Stephen Berard is the co-founder and CTO of Atym – a startup leveraging WebAssembly to bring Docker-like containerization to resource-constrained embedded devices. He has extensive experience building complex, large-scale Industrial IoT systems.
Prior to Atym, Stephen served as CTO at Momenta Ventures where he sourced and evaluated investment opportunities across digital industry and advised their portfolio startups.
Before Momenta, Stephen spent six years as Chief Architect of Schneider Electric’s EcoStruxure IoT platform technologies team. In this role, he drove the technical platform strategy alongside global business units to support their connected products and services.
Previously, he served for more than a decade as Technical Program Manager for the Microsoft Windows Core OS team. Learn more about Atym at atym.io.
Revolutionizing Embedded with WebAssembly-based Containerization
Status: Coming up in April 2025!Born in the browser, WebAssembly (Wasm) has immense potential to revolutionize software development and deployment for embedded devices and systems.
Unlike traditional containerization technologies like Docker, Wasm-based application containers do not require Linux as a foundation and are portable across any silicon architecture – spanning CPUs to MPUs and MCUs. Applications can be developed in different languages (e.g. C, Rust, Golang) and executed on devices in isolated containers, providing greater security and IP protection. Individual containers can be fractionally updated on devices without requiring a reboot or impacting the overall code base.
These attributes enable software for resource-constrained devices to be developed, deployed, managed, and maintained using modern cloud-native methods. Benefits include greatly reduced development complexity and cost, improved security and uptime, fractional updates without requiring reboots, and simplified ecosystem collaboration – especially when implementing new technologies such as on-device AI/ML.
Join this session with Atym co-founder and CTO Stephen Berard to learn more about WebAssembly and key benefits and use cases in the embedded space. He will also walk through industry collaboration to facilitate standardization, including the WebAssembly Embedded Special Interest Group (eSIG) in the Bytecode Alliance (a collaboration between Amazon, Atym, Bosch, Emerson, Microsoft, Siemens, Sony Midokura, and more), and the Linux Foundation’s Ocre project.
The intent of the Ocre community is to codify output from the eSIG, and with a footprint of just 128KB, the Ocre runtime supports containers on MCUs with as little as 256KB of memory. Atym leverages Ocre as part of its commercial device edge orchestration solution.