While the internet of things, particularly projections of connected devices, comes with a lot of hype, it’s also creating very real business value across a variety of enterprise and industrial verticals. But getting IoT right isn’t easy. As industry analyst Mike Krell has said, CIOs and technology decision makers don’t wake up one day and say to themselves, “I’m gonna go buy me some IoT.” From the device and connectivity to the data analysis and action step, there are a lot of moving parts. To simplify this paradigm, Qualcomm today announced its new wireless edge services portfolio, which encompasses the a set of LTE modems, on-boarding, over-the-air activation and upgrades.
To the modem piece, Qualcomm is focusing on industrial markets with the MDM9206, the automotive segment with the MDM9628 and the smart home with the QCA4020.
Describing the new offering as an evolution of the Snapdragon portfolio, Qualcomm Technologies Inc. SVP and GM of 4G/5G and Industrial IoT Serge Willenegger said the goal is “to better serve our expanding base of customers across many industries and unlock the potential associated with trusted wireless access to billions of increasingly capable edge devices. We are excited by the initial response from cloud, enterprise and industrial companies and are looking forward to working with them as well as our traditional customers to accelerate the transformative opportunity supported by advanced security, intelligence and wireless connectivity capability at the edge.”
Launch partners include Alibaba, Baidu, Gizwits and Mobike, among others. Mobike is a popular bike-sharing platform. In a statement, Mobike CTO Joe Xia said, “The subject of IoT Security is of critical importance to the field of shared mobility. Qualcomm wireless edge services enhanced security algorithm will help us to ensure the rights of our customers continue to be protected with the most advanced technology available. In addition, the flexible service structure offered…will help stimulate further innovation in IoT services across the industry.”
For the IoT developers out there, Qualcomm also announced its LTE IoT software development kit (SDK), which uses the multimode MDM9206 modem, GNSS and 1.3 GHz Cortex A7 CPU to help OEMs, app developers and a whole range of ecosystem stakeholders tailor a solution to their particular set of needs.
