Focus on Smart Cities: NEC Unveils FIWARE Lab node in India

NEC Corporation and NEC Technologies India Private Limited has launched a FIWARE Lab node in India to encourage application developers, solution providers, government bodies and academia to experiment and innovate with FIWARE based solutions for smart cities.

The new facility is expected to result in greater FIWARE development within Asia, as now all experiment and research data can be kept within the boundaries of the region.

In conjunction with the launch of the new facility, NECTI signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoU) with partners that include Tech Mahindra, Hughes Systique and Mobilepedia in order to explore collaboration on joint development of FIWARE-based solutions.

"The FIWARE Lab node in India managed by NEC enables companies developing smart city solutions for India to keep their experiment data within India. FIWARE brings in royalty free standards for interfaces and data models that help to integrate applications easily, which can be an edge over others for the smart city opportunities in India," said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of FIWARE Foundation through a video message during the launch event.

"With the launch of the FIWARE Lab Node, we provide ideal environment for verification of application based on the most recent and prominent container technology on the latest OpenStack platform. I firmly believe this will help application developers, solution providers and many others develop innovative solutions for Smart Cities," said Naoki Hashitani, Senior Vice President, System Integration, Services & Engineering Operations Unit, NEC Corporation. "We will promote the growth and expansion of FIWARE platform in India by introduce insights and know-how we have obtained from our FIWARE related Smart City projects around the world, including Spain, New Zealand and Portugal."

The NEC Group aims to achieve revenues of more than 150M USD from India and other parts of South East Asia by fiscal year 2020 through FIWARE-based solutions aided by the FIWARE Lab node. Since last year, NECTI has built a capacity of 100 engineers in FIWARE and related IoT and smart city solutions and plans to enhance this to 250 engineers in the next year.

NEC welcomes organizations, entrepreneurs and individuals to utilize this lab for learning FIWARE, as well as to test their applications while capitalizing on Open Data published by cities and other organizations.

During the inauguration event held today, more than 20 companies and organizations were represented, including Tech Mahindra, Hughes Systique and Mobilepedia, expressing their strong interest in working with NEC on the development of solutions using FIWARE.

"I congratulate NEC Technologies India on the launch of the FIWARE lab node. Technologies which are open help encourage collaboration among companies and provide an environment for innovation. I wish NEC and its partners all the best in this initiative," said Sanjeev Malhotra, CEO, Center of Excellence-IOT, NASSCOM.

"At Tech Mahindra, we strongly believe in Open source platforms and solutions. We are excited to collaborate with NEC Technologies India in promoting the concept for the benefit of Citizens through various IoT solutions", said Mr. Sanjeev Kumar, Head of Smart Cities (Global), Tech Mahindra.

"The FIWARE Lab node launch by NEC could not have come at a better time. India is aiming to become a hub of innovation and this lab node gives us an opportunity to work with NEC Technologies India in co-creating solutions and value added offerings in smart solutions," said Vinod Sood, MD, Hughes Systique.

"Mobilepedia congratulates NEC on launching a FIWARE Lab node in India. This will give a big boost to standards based smart solutions in India and will go a long way in bringing like-minded companies together to collaborate and create innovative solutions for smart cities. Mobilepedia is the first non-European Gold member of FIWARE, and the first company in India to deploy FIWARE based solutions in any Indian Smart city. We are willing to explore the possibility to collaborate with NEC Technologies India on various smart city solutions," said Mukul Mahajan, Director, Mobilepedia.

NEC is a platinum member of the FIWARE Foundation. NEC was the first Japan-originated Company to join the Foundation and has joined the board of directors and technical steering committee of the FIWARE Foundation, the foundation's decision-making authorities, thereby contributing to development, standardization and promotion of the FIWARE technology to accelerate smart city and smart industry businesses utilizing IoT.

The FIWARE Lab node, which is part of the FIWARE community, is a non-commercial sandbox environment where innovation and experimentation based on FIWARE technologies will take place. The lab node will be hosting Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city solutions for India and Asian countries. The new facility is the first FIWARE Lab node in India endorsed by FIWARE Foundation e.V., and the first FIWARE Lab node in the world based on the latest OpenStack release named Pike.