GE Digital Energy Japan, a subsidiary of GE – perhaps the industrial IoT’s most powerful mover and shaker – has formed an alliance with Japanese operator NTT Docomo.
The partnership will focus on developing IoT infrastructure, combining GE Digital Energy’s MDS Orbit Platform – an industrial wireless router– and Docomo’s embedded communication modules, to create a solution for remote access and monitoring capabilities, targeted at the energy sector.
The new joint GE-NTT solution will have application in industry in areas such as monitoring operational productivity of power plants and bridges. For example, data such as temperature and vibrations from sensors will be sent to Docomo’s Toami cloud platform (originally for M2M use) and the data can then be accessible by users via their mobile devices, where they can manage and analyze the data using strongly authenticated mobile platforms.
This isn’t the first IoT alliance for NTT Docomo. Last year it partnered with ThingWorx and Nippon Systemware (NSW) to develop its M2M cloud solutions and, before that, paired up with the likes of Panasonic and Jasper Wireless, who are all looking to grab a piece of the IoT and M2M market that is forecast to shoot up from $256bn in 2014 to $947bn in 2019 – according to Markets and Markets.
There are now over 3.17m individual IoT subscriptions in Japan. NTT Docomo has 47% of these with 1.5m users, mainly consisting of industrial sectors such as transport, logistics and surveillance. A relatively new IoT player, KDDI, has managed to secure more than 1m users in transport and logistics through its in-vehicle, small-scale, lightweight, and low-cost IoT communications services. The newest telco participant, SoftBank, has around 250,000 subscriptions, mostly supplying consumer electronics, as well as some elevator surveillance and vending machine devices.
Separately, GE itself has announced the installation of high speed network infrastructure, capable of reported speeds of 100Gbps. GE’s new network will support current M2M industrial applications as well as aiming to accelerate advancements in the field, especially though the Industrial Internet Consortium, which aims to turn GE’s frameworks into de facto standards and to build a broad platform with input from powerful players like AT&T and Cisco.
It was also recently revealed that GE has partnered with Pitney Bowes, the American provider of ecommerce solutions, for GE’s Predix software platform for the Industrial IoT. The plan is to develop asset performance management applications which will give Pitney Bowes and its customers the ability to analyze data from production mailing and shipping machines to provide client services, productivity services and job scheduling and capacity planning services.