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Nokia inks deal with Japan’s Rakuten for IoT deployment

With Nokia’s IoT platform, the Japanese company will be able to offer IoT services for sectors including agriculture, industry and automotive

BARCELONA–Nokia announced that Japanese operator Rakuten has selected its Impact IoT platform for the deployment of internet of things services across Japan.

With the deployment of this platform, the Japanese company will be in a position to deploy IoT applications across multiple sectors such as agriculture, industry and the automotive field, including connected vehicles, the Finnish vendor said, adding that Rakuten will be able to conceive and implement unique IoT use cases specific to the Japanese market and differentiate their offerings to business-to-business and business-to-consumer customers.

Under the commercial agreement, which was announced during Mobile World Congress 2019, Nokia will provide turnkey deployment and integration of the Impact platform.

Nokia said it is working with Rakuten to build vertical specific use cases and a comprehensive IoT ecosystem including system integrators, software developers and academia.

Tareq Amin, CTO of Rakuten Mobile Network, said that Rakuten’s  “experience as an IT company and strong presence in a wide variety of consumer tech industries and business domains puts us in a strong position in terms of deploying the IoT platform and applications. By leveraging our existing ecosystem and Nokia’s advanced IoT platform, we believe we will be able to create innovative, cost-effective IoT solutions and take a leading role in the market.”

“Rakuten has quickly established its presence in the Japanese service provider market and we are pleased to be providing it with our full Impact solution in order to help it seize the many IoT opportunities available in the country,” said Bhaskar Gorti, president of Nokia Software. “Impact is a great extension of our relationship with Rakuten and underlines the attractiveness of Nokia’s full end-to-end portfolio in the marketplace.”

Rakuten previously announced plans to launch commercial mobile services in Japan in October this year.

 

Chunghwa Telecom selects Ericsson to strengthen IoT capabilities

Also during MWC 2019, Ericsson announced that Taiwanese service provider, Chunghwa Telecom, selected the vendor’s IoT Accelerator to expand its IoT offering for enterprise customers and enable them to control and track their IoT assets with a unified connectivity management service.

Having collaborated on IoT since 2015, including a 2017 narrowband IoT and Cat-M1 system deal, the partnership expansion will enable Chunghwa’s enterprise customers to tap opportunities enabled by Ericsson IoT Accelerator.

Ericsson said that more than 30 service providers, spanning more than 100 countries, are currently part of its Ericsson IoT Accelerator ecosystem. The service currently enables connectivity management of IoT devices to more than 3,500 enterprises globally.

Max Chen, president of Chunghwa Telecom’s mobile business group said that the collaboration with Ericsson “marks an important milestone for our IoT businesses partnership in Taiwan and boosts our capabilities in machine learning and IoT operations. As Taiwan’s industry is mainly export-driven, Chunghwa Telecom’s IoT innovation drive will help local industries to expand their international IoT business horizon. We also aim to monetize 5G IoT ambitions for our enterprise customers in key segments such as government, finance, manufacturing, retail and logistics.”

ABOUT AUTHOR

Juan Pedro Tomás
Juan Pedro Tomás
Juan Pedro covers Global Carriers and Global Enterprise IoT. Prior to RCR, Juan Pedro worked for Business News Americas, covering telecoms and IT news in the Latin American markets. He also worked for Telecompaper as their Regional Editor for Latin America and Asia/Pacific. Juan Pedro has also contributed to Latin Trade magazine as the publication's correspondent in Argentina and with political risk consultancy firm Exclusive Analysis, writing reports and providing political and economic information from certain Latin American markets. He has a degree in International Relations and a master in Journalism and is married with two kids.