Cloud Innovation: Qualcomm Technologies Debuts 'Wireless Edge Services'

Qualcomm Technologies, has unveiled Qualcomm® wireless edge services a set of trusted software services designed to meet the requirements of new Enterprise and Industrial IoT customers to securely provision, connect and manage long life-cycles of billions of intelligent wireless devices through their cloud platforms.

Qualcomm wireless edge services software is expected to be exposed through new APIs and available on select Qualcomm Technologies’ chipsets – initially the MDM9206, MDM9628 and QCA4020 – and later on, select Qualcomm Snapdragon™ platforms.

As the relevance, capability and intelligence of the wireless edge increases, Qualcomm Technologies continues to evolve its leading Snapdragon portfolio to better serve and accelerate the realization of the data driven transformation central to our 5G vision. Qualcomm wireless edge services is anticipated to facilitate the integration, processing, analysis, learning and trusted exchange of information with wireless edge devices and unlock new use cases, services, ecosystems and business models, creating additional value across many industries.

With security rooted in the chipset hardware, Qualcomm wireless edge services is designed to assist large enterprise, industrial cloud providers and users in provisioning and managing massive amounts of connected 4G and 5G devices in a trusted, security-rich and scalable manner. It is also engineered to support a new Chipsets as a Service (CaaS) business model, in which the value of certain chipset capabilities can be realized through services.

Specifically, Qualcomm wireless edge services is expected to provide trusted device services as well as strong protection against compromised devices and network attacks through hardware-based device integrity. Qualcomm wireless edge services is designed to facilitate the deployment of edge devices at scale, as well as efficient zero-touch life-cycle management through services such as plug n play onboarding, on-demand, over-the-air feature activation, emergency and routine upgrades as well as third party service enablement throughout the device life-cycle. “With the introduction of Qualcomm wireless edge services, we continue to evolve and augment our leading Snapdragon portfolio to better serve our expanding base of customers across many industries and unlock the potential associated with trusted wireless access to billions of increasingly capable edge devices” said Serge Willenegger, senior vice president and general manager, 4G/5G and Industrial IOT, Qualcomm Wireless GmbH. “We are excited by the initial response from cloud, enterprise and industrial companies and are looking forward to working with them as well as our traditional customers to accelerate the transformative opportunity supported by advanced security, intelligence and wireless connectivity capability at the edge.”

Qualcomm wireless edge services is designed for and expected to be applicable across multiple segments and initially be offered on Qualcomm’s MDM9206 LTE Modem for Industrial IoT products, MDM9628 LTE Modem for Automotive products and QCA4020 for Home IoT products, which require extremely reliable connectivity and security. The initial support of Qualcomm wireless edge services on these chipsets is anticipated to be available in 2H 2018.

“At Alibaba, we are invested in developing leading-edge and reliable technologies to accelerate and support a broad range of commercial and industrial applications,” said Wei Ku, general manager, Alibaba Cloud IoT. “We see a strong synergy between Qualcomm wireless edge services and Alibaba Cloud Link, which will bring opportunities to expand security services and extend lifecycle management to customers, while also supporting greater feature management and flexibility.

“We believe very close collaboration between cloud computing and edge devices is necessary to address the challenges of the industrial IoT ecosystem,” said Ray Guan, deputy general manager, Baidu Cloud. “Qualcomm wireless edge services is a very promising technology which will allow the ecosystem to unlock new use cases and business models, and lower the barrier of entry for many customers.”

“We are excited to collaborate with Qualcomm Technologies in this new initiative”, said Jack Huang, chief executive officer, Gizwits, China’s leading IoT development platform and cloud service provider, “as Qualcomm wireless edge services will complement and augment our IoT cloud offering, helping us innovate in both technology and business models.”

“At MeiG, we understand that device security is a core requirement for today’s growing IoT,” said Benjamin Du, chief executive officer, MeiG Smart. “We expect that Qualcomm wireless edge services will give us increased flexibility and built in support for developing products that can be easily integrated with cloud infrastructure.”

Said, Joe Xia, chief technology officer, Mobike, “The subject of IoT Security is of critical importance to the field of shared mobility. Qualcomm wireless edge services enhanced security algorithm will help us to ensure the rights of our customers continue to be protected with the most advanced technology available. In addition, the flexible service structure offered by Qualcomm wireless edge services will help stimulate further innovation in IoT services across the industry.”

“Given the complexity of IoT requirements for modules and the very diverse verticals our products serve,” said Patrick Qian, chief executive officer, Quectel, “We anticipate that Qualcomm wireless edge services will be a fundamental tool to address the market needs with flexibility and scale.”

“As demand for device connectivity continues to grow across new use cases and industries, the requirements of the massive IoT are becoming increasingly more diversified,” said Wendy Wang, general manager, SIMCom Wireless. “SIMCom is providing service for an installed-base of 10,000 Enterprise customers with 100 million connections around the world today, we are excited about Qualcomm wireless edge services to help address such a big user base with strong hardware-based security design. With Qualcomm wireless edge services, we hope to continue to develop cost efficient LTE modules that meet the increasingly diversified connectivity, processing and security requirements without requiring an extra layer of hardware or software”.

Said Dr. Jun Zou, chief technology officer, Sunsea Group, “At Sunsea we believe IoT opportunities can be fully addressed with the right integration of edge devices and cloud. Qualcomm wireless edge services is a fundamental step in this direction and we look forward to collaborating with Qualcomm Technologies to provide even richer services to our customer base.”