NEC to establish FIWARE Lab node in India

Addressing growing demand for smart city applications across India

Noida, India & Tokyo, Japan, Dec 12, 2017 - NEC Corporation (NEC; TSE: 6701) and NEC Technologies India Private Limited (NECTI) today announced that they will establish a FIWARE Lab node in India. The objective is to encourage application developers and solution provider organizations, government bodies and academia to experiment and innovate FIWARE (*)-based solutions for smart cities. Having a FIWARE Lab node within India will encourage more participation from Asian countries as they can keep all experimental and research data within the boundaries of the region.

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.

Slated to start operation from April 2018, the facility will be the first FIWARE lab node in India endorsed by FIWARE Foundation e.V. 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, which is being established with an overall investment of 15M USD over the same period.

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 Lab is deployed over a geographically distributed network of federated nodes leveraging a wide range of experimental infrastructures.

"The FIWARE Foundation welcomes the new FIWARE Lab node starting in India. 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. "It is also our pleasure to have the NEC Technologies India team's commitment of making contributions to the FIWARE community, which will strengthen the FIWARE technology as well as its globalization as a smart city platform."

"Backed by the Indian Government's strong initiatives for smart city and digital India projects, 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. "We will fully utilize this facility in order to contribute to the FIWARE community's efforts and to develop and test our innovative solutions based on FIWARE technologies to address growing smart city opportunities."

NEC is a platinum member of the FIWARE Foundation. NEC was the first Japanese 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 the Internet of Things (IoT).

• (*) FIWARE is an open source platform which enables real-time smart services through data sharing across vertical domains and agencies via open standard-based APIs. 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.

About FIWARE Foundation

The FIWARE Foundation was founded as a legal non-profit association in October 2016. The purpose of the FIWARE Foundation is to serve the FIWARE Community which comprises all individuals and organizations committed to materialise the FIWARE mission, that is: "to build an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards that will ease the development of new Smart Applications in multiple sectors". These platform standards are materialized in the FIWARE Open Source Platform for helping startups and enterprises build the next generation of smart applications and services for cities, industries, e-health or agribusiness.