Huawei and China Mobile have announced a new cloud-based platform for mobile operators to enable and manage ‘internet-of-things’ (IoT) connections, promising easy scalability, rapid development, and higher returns for IoT products.
The ‘connectivity enablement platform’ (CEP) is being pushed to the wider operator market after development and deployment with China Mobile during the past 12 months.
China Mobile, the largest operator in the world, with 890 million customers, has consolidated 31 of its provincial systems into the platform, part of Huawei’s open OceanConnect family of solutions for IoT, cloud computing, and big data technologies.
Confusingly, China Mobile (and Huawei, variously) calls it the CM (either, ‘China Mobile, or connectivity management’, conveniently) IoT Platform.
The platform promises a centralised IoT management layer to replace inefficient distributed IoT platforms, and a ‘one-stop’ service for large enterprises to meet their service deployment requirements globally.
China Mobile has already seen its IoT connections jump by 100 million in less than 12 months, since the CEP Cloud / CM IoT Platform deployment. It now manages over 300 million IoT connections on the platform in total, and more than 50,000 IoT enterprise customers, making the Huawei / China Mobile system at once the “largest telco IoT platform in the world”.
Huawei said the platform has delivered a “step-change in business agility, cost-to-serve and IT performance” for China Mobile, with improvements of five-to-seven per cent in time-to-market, and general savings from cloud-based deployments, consolidated IoT networks, and more agile services.
But China’s IoT story is just beginning. Machina Research reckons IoT connections in China will reach eight billion by 2020. China Mobile has outlined a strategy, under the title ‘Big Connection’, to create an ‘internet of everything’ (IoE).
It wants to capture 595 million IoT connections in the period to 2020, and has launched a standalone business, China Mobile Information Technology Company, to provide unified service support for IoT services across the entire network.
Ali Shi, president of Huawei’s software business unit, said: “The evolution of telcos will be the basis for IoT. The IoT platform and ecosystem are key paths for the IoT digital world. Huawei has built the OceanConnect CEP Cloud to improve connection efficiency and ecosystem capabilities, to make IoT a real development engine for the telecoms industry.”
Xu Haiyong, general manager of China Mobile’s IT division, commented: “The CM IoT operation platform jointly developed by Huawei provides a new engine for China Mobile’s digital transformation. We will work together with IoT ecosystem partners to create a new, smart, and interconnected life.”
