Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has opened a new ‘customer experience centre’ in Bangalore (Bengaluru), in India, to offer IoT solutions to customers and partners from across industries.
The facility, on a 20,000 square-foot campus, shared with a global engineering centre for its Pointnext Services division, is part of HPE’s $500 million investment into India, announced last July (2019).
It will provide customers variously in the agriculture, automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, security, cities, energy and transportation sectors with access to connectivity, sensors, edge computing, and artificial intelligence to develop new IoT solutions in collaboration with HPE.
It will also showcase existing IoT proofs-of-concept. It is available as a collaborative resource to both private and public organisations.
The new experience centre follows a year after HPE opened an Industry 4.0 ‘innovation lab’ for industrial IoT and edge compute projects in Geneva, Switzerland. The Geneva facility, positioned to serve Europe’s industrial heartlands, is designed to bring a sharper competitive edge to its ‘converged edge’ portfolio, and commercial gains to partners.
HPE also launched a ‘centre of excellence’ in Andhra Pradesh last year, to train students in IoT-based agriculture. The facility provides students with access to advanced IT solutions, “for higher food production from finite land resources”.
The new centre in Bangalore, the state capital of Karnataka in southern India, is positioned to serve as a collaborative development centre for India’s digital workforce.
V. Ramana Reddy, the state government’s additional chief secretary for science and technology, commented: “The government is keen to leverage innovative solutions based on emerging technologies in developing smart cities and smart infrastructure.”
Som Satsangi, managing director of HPE in India, said: “IoT is already enabling a wide range of critical services across areas including healthcare, smart cities, and transportation… This facility will help our customers and partners harness the benefits of edge computing, which is increasingly moving computational tasks to where the data is being generated.”
Sanjay Mujoo, vice president at Pointnext Services, said: “India has emerged as one of the leaders in developing and implementing innovative solutions related to emerging technologies in smart cites, smart agriculture and smart manufacturing. Through the centre’s collaborative environment we will work closely with our customers and partners to develop, test, and assist them in the deployment of advanced IoT solutions.”
In July, HPE announced a plan to invest $500 million in India over the five years, to grow its operations and employee base in the country, and increase its R&D and services exports.
The company said it will grow its workforce by 20 per cent in the period, recruiting for expertise in artificial intelligence and networking, in particular. It said, as well, it will extend its Mahadevapura Campus in Bangalore in order to house more than 10,000 staff in R&D, eventually on a 1.3-million-square-foot site.
It is unclear, from the announcements, whether the new IoT experience centre is located at the Mahadevapura Campus. HPE has started, at the end of 2019, to manufacture Aruba’s portfolio of mobility and IoT solutions in India as well.
