Huawei, a leading ICT solutions provider, and Tyco recently signed a strategic partnership in China in what appears to be Huawei’s effort to wade into the smart city sector.
Huawei, a leading ICT solutions provider, and Tyco recently signed a strategic partnership in China in what appears to be Huawei’s effort to wade into the smart city sector.
Huawei has been in security for many years but has yet to create the same kind of prestige in security as it has in ICT. The company already has accumulated experience in the areas of network equipment, servers, storage, software and Big Data. But besides Hisilicon, Huawei’s presence in security has been relatively unnoticed.
That’s when the company turned to safe city as a way to boost its security business. Earlier, it announced the goal of having its safe city business churn out US$2 billion in revenue globally in three years.
As a way to promote the company’s safe city business, Huawei in mid-May held a global Safe City Summit, where it revealed how new ICT innovation including Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud computing are driving successful safe city deployments around the world.
Those points were included in a whitepaper, titled “Safe Cities: A Revolution Driven by New ICT,” that Huawei released at the event. The whitepaper was written in conjunction with IHS.
The whitepaper concluded that video surveillance, LTE and command and control solutions are the backbone of safe city and that IoT is an important trend, whereby data generated by an increasing number of sensors is managed and analyzed via ICT technology and converged communications. It also lists security threats, economic growth, data sharing, crime, political motivation and cost savings as some of the key market drivers for safe city initiatives.
Now, through the partnership with Tyco, Huawei seemingly aims to expand its influence into the smart city segment as well. The partnership entails integrating Huawei’s communications, storage, and software capability into Tyco’s TS3 platform.
As the starting point of the partnership, Huawei is to turn its Shenzhen headquarters into a smart technology park, building upon Tyco’s TS3 platform. Once the project completes, the park will see integration of not just access control, fire safety, video surveillance, and alarms, but also non-security systems such as illumination, HVAC, parking, and building control. The platform meanwhile will gather Big Data generated by the sensors and convert it into useful information, helping users gain further situational awareness and management efficiency.
Tyco for decades has established itself as a security giant with leading brands in various sub-sectors within security. Its purchase early this year by Johnson Controls, a leading building control solutions provider, has already created synergy, according to analysts. It is expected that the partnership between Huawei and Tyco will create the same kind of synergy in smart city, too, they said.