By MKPE ABANG
The world’s biggest telecommunications equipment maker, China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd, has taken a decisive lead on the new wave in technology, the ‘Internet of Things,’ by launching on Wednesday, May 20, 2015, its firm position on IoT, thereby becoming the latest technology giant to make a presentation on the innovation.
Huawei’s presentation is centered on an operating system designed to allow household and business appliances to communicate with each other online, hence the appellation Internet of Things (IoT).
Making the presentation at the Huawei Network Congress 2015 in Beijing, the company’s executives took turn to showcase its “Agile IoT” architecture, including an operating system called LiteOS to control basic devices. This marks the firm’s most significant push into a sector that has lured heavyweights from Google Inc to Intel Corp and IBM into pushing their own standards and communication protocols.
In what Huawei says is meant to enable enterprises to leverage opportunities in the era of Internet of Things, the company announced the launch of its Agile Network 3.0 Architecture at the HNC2015 themed “From Agility to Imagination” holding in Beijing over two days.
The solution, the company says, enables enterprises to build an agile IoT infrastructure to capture infinite business possibilities and to realise the digitisation of areas such as production, manufacturing and logistics.
Huawei predicts that by 2025, a total of 100 billion connections will be generated globally and two million new sensors will be deployed every hour. However, our networks today cannot provide the connectivity to support this. As part of HNC, Huawei is launching its Agile IoT Solution, which consists of three core components: Agile IoT gateway, Agile Controller and LiteOS, a lightweight IoT operating system (OS).
“Huawei believes that standardising ICT infrastructure will foster the development of Internet applications, including IoT applications. To address this, Huawei is launching our IoT OS, LiteOS,” said Mr. William Xu, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Huawei, at the Congress.
LiteOS is the world’s most lightweight IoT OS. It is small in size at 10KB and supports zero configuration, auto-discovery, and auto-networking. It can be widely applied to different areas including smart homes, wearable, connected vehicles and other industries. The LiteOS helps to simplify the development of smart hardware to enhance IoT connectivity. In addition, Huawei announced that LiteOS will be opened to all developers, which enables them to quickly develop their own IoT products.
While Huawei is focused on developing IoT infrastructure products and solutions, it is also committed to establishing an industry application-oriented IoT ecosystem through collaborating with upstream and downstream partners to develop industry solutions. This is part of Huawei’s approach to develop and provide Business-driven ICT Infrastructure (BDII).
Yan Lida, President of Huawei Enterprise Business Group said in his keynote speech, “BDII requires close business collaboration and joint innovation efforts between Huawei and our partners. We have been involved in industry alliances, worked with standard organizations in the area of IoT, and established innovative research centers, open labs, and development communities to foster industry development.”
Another Huawei executive, Liu Shaowei, President, Switch and Enterprise Communication Product Line, Huawei, said:
“Over the last three years, Huawei has been involved in a number of in-depth technological collaborations with our global industry partners in IoT. We have developed a series of IoT solutions that have already been applied to buildings, electricity meters, vehicles, gymnasiums, factories, retail outlets, and street lights. In line with our approach to provide BDII, Huawei will continue to work with more partners to launch solutions based on our Agile Network architecture for different vertical industries.”
Aside from the Agile IoT Solution, Huawei also released a number of new products and technologies in the areas of data centers, enterprise wireless campus, Wide Area Network (WAN) and network security. These products include the 100T data center switches, the Wi-Fi and LTE Integration Access Agile Mobile Solution, high throughput routers with enhanced transmission efficiency, and the “Device, Network, Cloud” End-to-end Security Solution.
HNC2015 is a major industry event that brings together more than 6,000 customers, channel partners, journalists, analysts, and others from more than 43 countries around the globe and 41 exhibitors including Intel, SAP, IBM, VMware, Infosys and China Telecom.