California-based Industry 4.0 connectivity specialist Ataya has announced a flurry of system integrator and channel reseller deals to launch its Harmony industrial connectivity platform in Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. The firm has announced ADLINK, Wave-in Communications, Quanta Computer, Accuver Group, and Opticoms will variously sell the system outside of the US.
The Harmony platform, launched last year, claims to support “unified connectivity solutions for Industry 4.0”. It has so far been installed by “numerous tier-one global manufacturers and enterprises”, the company said; it listed deployments at a ‘smart factory’ run by Taiwan-based edge computing firm ADLINK and at the Kaohsiung Exhibition Center, both in Taiwan, plus with electronics trading firm Marubun and test and measurement outfit Accuver in Japan.
Puneet Sethi, senior vice president of products at Ataya, said: “Harmony has captured significant customer interest globally. To serve growing demand and existing customers, we now have partnerships with resellers and systems integrators globally. That provides competitive advantage to our regional partners, as they can leverage universal connectivity, reduce costs [with the] turnkey multi-tenant Harmony platform and improve their customers’ experience.”
Johann Schmid, chief executive at Germany-based Opticoms, which has relationships with Airspan and Druid Software, said: “We are the regional leaders in industrial and private 5G and have spent many years surveying, investing and validating multiple vendor solutions. Ataya’s Harmony solution stands out because of its universal connectivity and focus on managed service provider capabilities – which was a deciding factor for us and is already yielding results for our business.”
Last month, Ataya launched a simplified standalone 5G (5G SA) access point for small and medium-sized private 5G deployments, claiming a zero-touch setup at an affordable price – without the kinds of “complexities [and] additional hardware” that have so far hindered the private 5G market, it said. The product, Chorus, stands apart on the grounds its simplicity will open up the SME-end of the industrial market, it said.
It said other attempts to produce simplified systems have “limited functionality by permitting single node-only deployments or necessitat[ed] that all user traffic is routed through a public cloud”. The firm called it a “significant development” for private 5G to achieve mass-market scale among SMEs – and not just to stay as an expensive tech play-thing for deep-pocketed multinational corporations.
ADLINK used the press announcement about its partnership with Ataya to push its own MicroRAN solution, pitched for “digital transformation in smart manufacturing”, and as a complement to Ataya’s industrial connectivity platform and private 5G product, and for modish Industry 4.0 applications like autonomous mobile robots (AMR). “We are seeing substantial interest in the implementation of universal connectivity in industrial applications,” said Stephen Huang, chief operating officer at the firm.
His namesake, Jay Huang, founder and chairman at Taiwan-based Wave-in Communications, commented: “Universal connectivity and multi-tenancy features of the Harmony platform are key to our business. We have multiple deployments with Harmony and continue onboarding new customers. Our partnership with Ataya allows us to provide a robust multi-tenant platform that enables us and our reseller and MSP business to scale.”
Steve Cheng, vice president and general manager at Quanta Computer, said: “Harmony’s enterprise friendly management system and zero-trust security, helps in meeting the diverse requirements of customers. Our relationship with Ataya is now expanding beyond the Harmony product to integrate Quanta RAN management capabilities and the newly announced Chorus product.”
Jimmy Kim, chief executive at Accuver Group, selling the solution in Japan, said: “We are excited to partner with Ataya to expand our portfolio to private network solutions. Q-5G Harmony is our complete end-to-end solution for private networks. Universal connectivity features have resonated well with our customer base as our customers can see the differentiation with other competing solutions in the market.”
