NEC Corporation will set up a FIWARE Lab node in India with an investment of $15 million to tap smart city projects.
FIWARE Lab node is expected to encourage application developers and solution provider organizations, government bodies and academia to experiment and innovate FIWARE-based solutions for smart cities.
NEC said the FIWARE Lab node in India will help to foster a culture of collaboration between various participating entities and help to promote their solutions in the FIWARE community. With the Indian government increasing its focus on Open Source Software, FIWARE can introduce open APIs based on specifications which are public and royalty-free.
NEC will start operation of the facility from April 2018. The facility will be the first FIWARE lab node in India endorsed by FIWARE Foundation. NEC aims to achieve revenues of more than $150 million from India and other parts of South East Asia by fiscal year 2020 through FIWARE-based solutions aided by the FIWARE Lab node.
FIWARE Lab, which is part of the FIWARE community, is a non-commercial sandbox environment where innovation and experimentation based on FIWARE technologies take place. Organizations, entrepreneurs and individuals can utilize this lab for learning FIWARE, as well as to test their applications while capitalizing on Open Data published by cities and other organizations.
“FIWARE is used by an increasing number of cities in Europe and other regions and I wish this new FIWARE Lab node will trigger the adoption of FIWARE both in India and other APAC countries,” said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of FIWARE Foundation.
“We have seen huge demand in India to develop IoT-based applications for multiple sectors, for which FIWARE technologies can serve as an open and common platform. In this sense, India is a natural choice for us to establish the FIWARE Lab node,” said Naoki Hashitani, senior vice president, System Integration, Services & Engineering Operations Unit, NEC Corporation.
NEC, a platinum member of the FIWARE Foundation, was the first Japanese company to join the Foundation, for contributing to development, standardization and promotion of the FIWARE technology to accelerate smart city and smart industry businesses utilizing the Internet of Things (IoT).
FIWARE focuses on specifications for common context information API, data publication platforms and standard data models in order to achieve and improve cross-sector interoperability for smart applications, with FIWARE NGSI as a starting point. The technology is present in more than 100 cities in 23 countries in Europe and other regions. It is royalty free and avoids any vendor lock-in.
