As a massive conglomerate, with hundreds of thousands of employees, Samsung (News - Alert) is a multibillion dollar industrial technology and equipment company, and over the last several years has been making steady inroads in IoT, including with the launch of its Artik sensors, which rapidly evolved into an end-to-end platform including cloud services. Created with developers in mind, Artik sensors were introduced to a growing community of “makers” but evolved into an open data exchange platform for the IoT.
In parallel, the company invested and continues to invest heavily in industrial IoT capabilities, including IoT gateways, LoRaWAN equipment and software, a cellular LTE Radio Access Solution supporting NB-IoT, a Wireless Intrusion (News - Alert) Prevention System (WIPS) sensor that monitors the user status of the gateway in real time and more.
In other words, Samsung is going after the IoT and IIoT markets with full force, attacking it from different angles, at different layers in the tech stack, with hardware and software, and in the network core, in the cloud and – on the edge.
So it is no surprise Samsung announced today with the Linux Foundation (News - Alert) that is has become a platinum member of the fast-growing EdgeX Foundry community, contributing to the more rationale evolution of IIoT frameworks making interop and integration easier for customers who want the freedom to choose their IIoT solution components depending on the specific problem they are trying to solve.
Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. joined EdgeX to “support Samsung’s emerging efforts in the industrial sector while expanding the market of EdgeX compatible components and devices,” according to an announcement released earlier today.
“The true potential of IoT will be realized with solutions that cross both the consumer and industrial sectors. As one of the largest manufacturing companies in the world, having seamless IoT across our business domains and factories would streamline operations and drive efficiencies, but interoperability is a major challenge,” said Kyeongwoon Lee, SVP, Samsung Electronics. “EdgeX Foundry delivers the interoperability, flexibility and scalability that businesses need to deploy Industrial IoT solutions without hesitation, and it will enable us to create lightweight edge solutions that can support real-time operations for our manufacturing infrastructures.”
We have been covering EdgeX since its inception earlier this year, when the Linux Foundation rolled out the community with 50 members – an astonishing number for a new organization – at Hannover Messe (News - Alert). EdgeX launched with Dell as a major contributor, and has attracted companies including NetFoundry, Ubuntu, Neustar, Mocana and dozens more.
New members are joining every week, but Samsung is only the third platinum member alongside Analog Devices (News - Alert) and Dell. EdgeX is not a standards body, per se, but rather an open source project building an interoperability framework on a fast path to create a full hardware- and OS-agnostic reference software platform. EdgeX is more of an ecosystem, with a mission to support plug-and-play components that unify the marketplace to accelerate rational deployments – faster innovation, testing, and commercialization in Industrial IoT realms, which have been slowed down historically by significant fragmentation following the “gold rush” early hype cycle.
Designed to run on any hardware or operating system and with any combination of application environments, EdgeX members are actively developing use cases, and soon real life projects, with easier interoperability between connected devices, applications and services, across a wide range of use cases.
“As one of the biggest global companies, Samsung has extensive experience in manufacturing, consumer electronics and mobile devices and we are excited that they are bringing that knowledge to help support and collaborate with the EdgeX ecosystem,” said Philip DesAutels, Senior Director, IoT, The Linux Foundation. “Samsung brings credibility and vast experience to EdgeX Foundry, and EdgeX Foundry helps Samsung strengthen their industrial IoT efforts with a common platform support by a growing ecosystem of Industrial IoT vendors.”