Qualcomm Technologies has unveiled its new ‘Wireless Edge Services’ offering, which it describes as a suite of software services designed to help both enterprise and industrial IoT customers to securely provision, connect, and manage long life-cycles of billions of intelligent wireless devices securely through their cloud platforms.
The software is expected to be exposed through new APIs and available on the company’s select chipsets – initially the MDM9206 LTE modem for industrial IoT, MDM9628 LTE modem for automotive and QCA4020 for home IoT, which require extremely reliable connectivity and security.
The initial support of Qualcomm wireless edge services on these chipsets is anticipated to be available in 2H 2018. Later on, Qualcomm plans to make the offering available on its select Snapdragon platforms.
The company boasted that the security and ability of the software to scale will help it to assist large enterprise, industrial cloud providers and users in provisioning and managing massive amounts of connected 4G and 5G devices.
The software is also engineered to support a new Chipsets as a Service (CaaS) business model, in which the value of certain chipset capabilities can be realized through services.
Specifically, Qualcomm wireless edge services is expected to provide trusted device services as well as strong protection against compromised devices and network attacks through hardware-based device integrity.
“With the introduction of Qualcomm wireless edge services, we continue to evolve and augment our leading Snapdragon portfolio 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” said Serge Willenegger, senior vice president and general manager, 4G/5G and Industrial IOT, Qualcomm Wireless GmbH. “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.”
“At Alibaba, we are invested in developing leading-edge and reliable technologies to accelerate and support a broad range of commercial and industrial applications,” said Wei Ku, general manager, Alibaba Cloud IoT. “We see a strong synergy between Qualcomm wireless edge services and Alibaba Cloud Link, which will bring opportunities to expand security services and extend lifecycle management to customers, while also supporting greater feature management and flexibility.
“We believe very close collaboration between cloud computing and edge devices is necessary to address the challenges of the industrial IoT ecosystem,” said Ray Guan, deputy general manager, Baidu Cloud. “Qualcomm wireless edge services is a very promising technology which will allow the ecosystem to unlock new use cases and business models, and lower the barrier of entry for many customers.”
“Given the complexity of IoT requirements for modules and the very diverse verticals our products serve,” said Patrick Qian, chief executive officer, Quectel, “We anticipate that Qualcomm wireless edge services will be a fundamental tool to address the market needs with flexibility and scale.”
“As demand for device connectivity continues to grow across new use cases and industries, the requirements of the massive IoT are becoming increasingly more diversified,” said Wendy Wang, general manager, SIMCom Wireless. “SIMCom is providing service for an installed-base of 10,000 Enterprise customers with 100 million connections around the world today, we are excited about Qualcomm wireless edge services to help address such a big user base with strong hardware-based security design. With Qualcomm wireless edge services, we hope to continue to develop cost-efficient LTE modules that meet the increasingly diversified connectivity, processing and security requirements without requiring an extra layer of hardware or software”.
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