NEC joins FIWARE Foundation to add open source flavour to smart city systems

NEC Corporation, the company behind major IT-integrating network technologies, has joined the non-profit FIWARE Foundation as a platinum member. This is to enable open source technologies for smart city focused systems.

FIWARE works as an open source middleware platform – designed to promote the crossindustry use of data and promote service collaborations among the companies and municipalities that provide public services. The solution was developed under the European Union’s Future Internet PublicPrivate Partnership (FI-PPP) project. It has been adopted by a large number of cities and companies across Europe and some other parts of the world.

“The FIWARE Foundation is a visible commitment of European businesses to bring more innovative Internet services to consumers, citizens, businesses and the public sector,” said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the FIWARE Foundation. “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,” he added.

NEC will join the board of directors and technical steering committee of the FIWARE Foundation that serves the community as the decision-making authority for FIWARE technologies. The NEC team will also contribute to development, standardisation and promotion of FIWARE technology to accelerate smart city and smart industry businesses utilising Internet of Things (IoT).

“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 of IoT strategy, NEC Corporation.

The Germany-headquartered FIWARE Foundation is empowering some of the leading smart city projects worldwide. There are FIWARE-based solutions in Santander, Spain, to advance the waste collection management service in the city. Wellington in New Zealand has also deployed the open source software to forecast traffic volumes and analyse environmental situations.

NEC is set to leverage FIWARE to develop a model for industrial waste collection services in Kawasaki City in Japan. This would be the first project on Japanese soil to use the advanced middleware solution.