Reliance Jio Infocomm is gearing up to harness Internet of Things (IoT), focusing first on enterprises and industries while initiating talks with car manufacturers and consumer durable companies as well, among others, for the consumer segment.
The 4G entrant has brought on board Ayush Sharma from Silicon Valley as senior vice president of engineering and technology, to drive the business around IoT and other technologies such as mobile edge computing, distributed artificial intelligence and blockchain.
According to ETTelecom Sharma said “Jio is looking at these technologies to enable world’s largest programmable network with alternate technologies available.” “It will take at least around a year to enable consumer IoT, but the large focus is on enterprise IoT. We are working on specific use cases.”
Sharma has joined the company after working on his own venture, Moto Jeannie, in the United States, and has worked for telecom gear makers Huawei and Ericsson, and Cisco in the past in the US. At Jio, Sharma is building a team of engineers to deploy and develop these technologies.
“The idea is not just to launch IoT products and solutions for consumer IoT but also for enterprise and industries,” Sharma said, adding that the parent company, Reliance Industries, is looking to use these technologies initially within in-house verticals such as retail and logistics to make them intelligent.
For consumer IoT, Jio is working with a variety of technology vendors and bringing car manufacturers, consumer durables and appliances players, among others, on board to build a complete ecosystem, Sharma said. “We are building our own platform with big data strength,” he said.
Jio’s 4G network will complement IoT for enterprise and industrial use cases that required bandwidth and latency, he said.
The company had recently said that it had started offering enterprise solutions along with fibre-to-the-home on a trial basis in a few locations.
It also has a plan to roll out home broadband-powered home automation that will allow users to convert basic electronic products into smart products with the installation of six-seven smart plugs. These smart plugs will allow users to control the entire home with the help of smartphones or tablets.
Jio is also planning to launch a complete suite of home surveillance comprising smart camera, smart doorbell, smart lock and chime alarm. All these products can be managed from the user’s mobile devices, ET had earlier reported.
The company’s bigger rival, Bharti Airtel, is also planning to enter the home automation or smart home segment with its IoT and machine-to-machine solutions in a move aimed at expanding its revenue base.
The home automation segment is in its nascent stages and real application of use cases and processes have just started to crystallise for the industry. According to a study by Zion Market Research, the global smart home market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.5% between 2017 and 2022. The market revenue is expected to grow from $24.10 billion in 2016 to $53.45 billion by 2022.
Jio plans to focus on leveraging the open source ecosystem to unlock potential in the telecom sector. Sharma, who was involved in the ONOS project, an open source community hosted by The Linux Foundation, will also be involved in the open source related efforts.
