NEC joins FIWARE Foundation as a platinum member to accelerate smart city and IoT-related business
NEC Corporation has joined the FIWARE Foundation e.V., a non-profit organisation. The foundation promotes the dissemination of FIWARE technology, as a platinum member. NEC is the first and only Japanese company to join the foundation.
NEC will join the board of directors and technical steering committee of the FIWARE Foundation, the foundation’s decision-making authorities, thereby contributing to development, standardisation and promotion of the FIWARE technology to accelerate smart city and smart industry businesses utilising IoT (Internet of Things).
FIWARE is a middleware platform that was developed under the European Union’s Future Internet Public-Private Partnership (FI-PPP) project. It is open-source software that has a standardised set of open APIs, aiming to promote the cross-industrial use of data and service collaborations among the companies and municipalities that provide public services.
Many cities and companies in Europe and other parts of the world have adopted FIWARE for their smart city-related systems. For instance, NEC has provided FIWARE-based solutions to Santander, Spain, to help advance the city’s waste collection management service and also to Wellington, New Zealand, to help forecast traffic volume and understand the environmental situations in the city, contributing to safe, secure and efficient communities. Kawasaki City, Japan, will also capitalise on NEC know-how to optimise its industrial waste collection services.
NEC will enhance its IoT solutions by combining FIWARE with NEC’s existing assets, such as its set of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, “NEC the WISE”, and system integration platform, the “NEC the WISE IoT Platform”.
“The FIWARE Foundation is a visible commitment of European businesses to bring more innovative internet services to consumers, citizens, businesses and the public sector. We welcome NEC as a platinum member of the FIWARE Foundation and are looking forward to writing the future story of FIWARE together with NEC.
I’m proud of the commitment of NEC to provide FIWARE-based offerings also to the market in Japan especially in the area of Smart Cities and Smart Industry, which are also focus areas of the FIWARE Foundation,” said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the FIWARE Foundation which is headquartered in Germany.
“NEC will provide advanced social solutions and contribute to the realisation of a super smart society (Society 5.0), for which FIWARE’s unique capabilities, including cross-industrial use of data and service collaborations, will play a crucial role,” said Yasunori Mochizuki, senior vice president, IoT Strategy, NEC Corporation.
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