Aricent Expands IoT Commitment, Creates Dedicated IoT Engineering Portfolio

BARCELONA, SPAIN--(Marketwired - Mar 2, 2015) - Aricent today launched a dedicated "IoT Engineering Services" portfolio to help the world's top innovators accelerate development of software, hardware and network products for the Internet of Things.

Aricent's expanded IoT services take full advantage of the firm's in-depth expertise in software and connectivity to help clients improve the speed, quality and cost of IoT product development. The services, coupled with Aricent's enabling software and reference designs, are proven to cut product development cycles by 30% to 50%. Target product initiatives include connected cars, connected homes, wearable devices, embedded systems, industrial automation, smart energy and smart cities.

"IoT is a phenomenon that will impact product and service firms across all sectors of the economy," said Rakesh Vij, vice president of innovation at Aricent. "The clean divide between physical and digital worlds is crumbling, thanks to a powerful blend of software, sensors and connectivity. We have been privileged to work with early pioneers in this space, and we're excited to expand our IoT commitment with dedicated engineering teams, advanced R&D investment and new partnerships."

Aricent's IoT Engineering Services encompass the entire concept-to-cash product lifecycle, including: product and service strategy, hardware and silicon design, software and mobile development, cloud infrastructure, device and application management, systems integration, end-to-end testing and product support.

Aricent has also created several pieces of enabling software for IoT development, including new IoT Gateway middleware being demonstrated here at Mobile World Congress 2015. The middleware provides connectivity across IoT devices and machines, multiple network technologies and cloud infrastructure. The IoT Gateway's components can be fully customized and re-used as part of a client's solution, including horizontal and vertical IoT applications and services.

As one of many use cases, Aricent will showcase at #MWC15 a newly developed "Smart Community Management" solution built with Texas Instruments -- based on the Aricent IoT Gateway running on TI Sitara ARM Cortex A8 processor. The solution illustrates how a common IoT infrastructure can be used by utilities, governments, real estate managers and residents to better manage community and home resources. Examples include:

• Real estate managers can deliver cloud-based applications and analytics to help residents control their home environment and energy usage;
• Communities can use demand-response infrastructure for real-time collaboration among utilities, governments and residents for building smarter cities; and
• Other applications and services to be created locally based on common, portable middleware that works across multiple hardware and software platforms.

"We're thrilled to see Aricent enable innovative industrial IoT solutions on the TI Sitara platform," said Arnon Friedmann, marketing director at Texas Instruments. "Short time to market is critical for success, and the combination of TI's silicon platforms with Aricent's engineering services can dramatically shorten development cycles. We look forward to helping customers bring their industrial IoT ambitions to fruition on the TI Sitara platform."

In addition to TI, Aricent has developed a strong partner ecosystem including IoT platform providers and top semiconductor, software, networking, telecom, Internet and industrial companies. Aricent has collaborated with these partners to build IoT applications for fleet management, industrial safety, smart energy, connected home services and other use cases. Aricent also partners with global product strategy and design firm frog (an Aricent company) to help clients anticipate the future, solve complex problems and advance the human experience of IoT.

Aricent's IoT services and enabling software are based on popular industry standards that make them highly interoperable, including: WiFi, BLE, 3G/LTE, ZigBee, ZWave, 6LowPAN, PLC/Prime, DLMS/COSEM, DNP3, ModBus, DLNA, ETSI M2M, OpenADR, OMA-DM, LWM2M, CoAP and UPnP.

For more perspective on IoT product engineering, click here to read Aricent's five-part blog series or here to access Aricent's white paper: "Never Mind the IoT, Here Comes the Third Wave."

About Aricent
Aricent is the world's #1 pure-play product engineering services firm. The company has 20-plus years' experience co-creating ambitious products with the top networking, telecom, software, semiconductor, Internet and industrial companies. The firm's 10,000-plus engineers focus exclusively on software-powered innovation for the connected world. Key investors are KKR & Co. LP and Sequoia Capital.