Chinese smart metering firm Hexing is bundling the Pelion IoT platform, from UK-based silicon design company Arm, and low-power Wi-SUN connectivity into its advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), as it seeks to expand into Southeast Asia, India, South America, and Europe.
Hexing is offering Wi-SUN based smart meters with Arm’s Pelion device management platform. Its customers will be able to form “full-stack IoT solutions” to deploy, connect, secure, and manage AMI setups as they seek to bring control, efficiency and dynamism to their utility networks.
Dave Weidner, senior director for market development in Arm’s Pelion division, said: “Unlocking the value of IoT and reaching massive scale requires a collaborative team effort. Hexing is just the latest example of our growing Pelion partner ecosystem.”
Liangzhang Zhou, chairman at Hexing, said: “The Pelion platform delivers “proven device management and meter control to operate and maintain the in-life assets, as well as the cost-effective solution for utilities.”
Arm said Wi-SUN offers a mesh network architecture to minimise direct cellular connections for devices without impacting bandwidth, throughput, or security. “Wi-SUN unlocks radically lower operating costs for large-scale device deployments that is critical for these markets,” said Weidner.
Zhou added: “Single-network, multi-application deployments adhering to Wi-SUN standards ensure utilities can be confident that their technology is on the most reliable, economical, and extensible secure network available today.”
Arm is targeting three distinct IoT ‘verticals’: energy and utilities, asset tracking, and smart buildings and retail management. In the utilities space, covering smart metering, it struck a deal with Singapore-based EDMI in March last year to provide the management platform for smart meter devices, connectivity, and data.
EDMI, owned by Osaki Electric Company in Japan, has major smart metering deals with water, gas, and electric utilities in Asia and Europe. EDMI has “millions of endpoints” globally. Its deal with Arm will see it integrate the Pelion IoT platform and Mbed device operating system into its offer to utility providers.
Arm partnered with Reflexis, which sells store execution software, in January last year to allow retail store associates to obtain actionable tasks based on real-time IoT data from the solution. Its unified data management solution enables retailers to securely consolidate, unify and manage physical in-store IoT data and digital customer data to obtain a holistic view of the shopper experience, it claims.
In May, Arm launched a work-space analytics tool, Space Analytics, to give property managers of co-working spaces, commercial offices and hotels a view of the utilisation and availability of offices and hospitality spaces. Space Analytics is part of its Pelion Smart Spaces portfolio, running on its Pelion IoT platform. It takes data from off-the-shelf IoT devices like cameras, beacons, sensors, and smart lighting, as well as from standard enterprise systems.
Arm has also launched an updated version of its Pelion IoT connectivity management platform for mobile network operators. The 2.0 version will help operators to offer a simplified device management tool, featuring higher levels of automation, to enterprises bringing online large numbers of IoT devices across multiple territories.
Arm said the tweaks are the result of feedback from operators. It said the new version will improve the IoT services operators make available to clients, notably device provisioning and billing accuracy, as well as benefiting the speed and reliability of their IoT connectivity.
