Berlin, 30th April 2019 – A reception for new FIWARE members will be hosted by the FIWARE Foundation at its Head Office in Berlin on April 30th, between 14:00-18:00. The event will mark the starting point of a greater level of implementation and closer collaboration between the relevant new member associations, all of whom are well established within their own vertical domains. It will, in turn, provide a crucial stepping stone towards the furthering of the uptake of FIWARE technologies worldwide.
The FIWARE Foundation is aiming to reach out, scale up and make a lasting impact for everyone, through using FIWARE technology, data models and common standards as the basis of providing communal benefit to its users. It, therefore, looks forward to welcoming ten new members; Digitanimal, Hyrde SL, ICE Gateway GmbH, Intellimech, Kommunal 4.0, NEXT Data Service AG, SIBB e.V., Smart City Association Italy, Tikal Technologies SL, and WAZIUP e.V., as they each provide their own unique expertise within their own domains. Their contribution as members will be instrumental in helping to achieve the FIWARE mission: to industrialize the FIWARE open software framework for platforms of smart applications.
Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the FIWARE Foundation, commented: “FIWARE, an Open Source platform technology which was born in Europe is getting more and more attention and adoption on a global scale. This was demonstrated again during last week’s Smart City Expo in Buenos Aires. Cities like Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay have in the meantime full blown Smart City platforms based on FIWARE technology in operation. And also the segment of Smart Industry is gaining more and more attention.
Therefore I’m more than happy that on Tuesday several companies and organizations will join the FIWARE Foundation as new members to design our smart digital future together with us.”
CITIES IN A WORLD OF CHANGE
On their journey towards becoming smart, cities today continue to face long-standing challenges such as vendor lock-in and the lack of interoperability across legacy systems. They would like to be able to implement best practices learnt from others in order to avoid reinventing the wheel. Meanwhile, looking from the provider viewpoint, solution providers want to be able to deploy and scale innovative products, and startups, need to test their pilots and find customers, whilst working on disruptive business models.
How can these different players work together in a world where big data, global platforms, AI and machine learning, create new paradigms of collaboration and knowledge sharing? How will this work in a business environment where linear and rigid procurement processes are replaced by more flexible and fluid approaches? How will cities deal with the concerns of their citizens regarding transparency, data privacy, and inclusion?
Data management, micro- and nano- services, APIs and global data standards are key assets in this changing landscape. Cities, companies, and startups need to evolve together and co-create solutions to answer the challenges of today.
The international FIWARE community of developers, corporates, SMEs and public bodies provides a fertile playground of ideas where like-minded people meet and work together on open source projects. Within this community, as well as through the FIWARE Foundation’s joint ‘Front-Runner Smart Cities Initiative’ with TM Forum, the adoption of a reference architecture and compatible common data models provides the basis to build cost-effective solutions that can scale across cities, regions, and countries.
The European Commission recognizes the potential of FIWARE and its underlying technologies and has adopted the Context Broker, the core component of FIWARE, as a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) Building Block. The CEF Context Broker Building Block enables organizations, including public administrations, to share data in real time at the right time. The technology has therefore been recommended as a standard for the creation of Digital Service Infrastructures to be deployed across Europe.
GERMANY – A HUGE POTENTIAL
Countries such as Estonia, Denmark, and the Netherlands have led the digital transformation of cities in recent years while Germany has lagged behind.
There is an urgent need for a step change in innovation within the realms of Mobility (so-called “Verkehrswende”) and Smart Cities. Such a task cannot be achieved by relying on existing common and legacy frameworks alone. For years, the international FIWARE community has been at the front line of building a new framework for enabling innovation within these areas. Together with its members, FIWARE is providing a solution to many of the global challenges of today.
In addition, there are various recent initiatives that aim to speed up the transformation process. Via the current open call from the BMI (the Ministry of the Interieur in Germany), a total of up to 50 model projects are to be developed in the coming years with a targeted funding amount of 750 million Euros in order to create transferable solutions for municipalities. Furthermore, many Lighthouse programs were started last year in both North-Rhine Westphalia and Baden Württemberg, aiming for fast implementation of smart city projects.
The FIWARE Foundation is actively working to help with this monumental transition, supported by the German Federal Ministries of the Interior (BMI) and the Economy (BMWi).
MEET THE NEW MEMBERS
The mission of the FIWARE Foundation is to build the open source platform for our digital future. One cornerstone of its activities is to partner with organizations that share the same ideals and competences.
The FIWARE Foundation therefore warmly welcomes its new partners:
DIGITANIMAL
https://digitanimal.com
Digitanimal, a SaaS integrated platform based on animal wearables and machine learning algorithms to monitor and manage the cattle easily from calving to the consumer’s hands, providing a unique traceability mechanism that ensures quality and added value.
HYRDE SL
https://www.hyrde.io
Hyrde is dedicated to facilitating you realizing your Internet of Things solutions. With its award-winning IoT Application Development Enabling Platform, it is able to connect everything with a ‘digital pulse’ with your preferred business and operating applications.
ICE GATEWAY GMBH
https://www.ice-gateway.com
Ice Gateway’s smart city solutions are customized to the individual needs of any city or enterprise with the aim of increasing citizens’ quality of life and strengthening businesses’ competitiveness. Its multifunctional edge computer enables Smart City applications to run in real-time, collect and process data locally and send it to any customer platform via APIs.
INTELLIMECH
https://www.intellimech.it
Intellimech is a Consortium of high-tech enterprises dedicated to the interdisciplinary research in the mechatronics field, which comprises advanced electronics, computer, and ICT systems and mechanical design for application in a wide range of industrial sectors. Given its size, Intellimech is one of the most important Italian private initiatives of collaborative research and can count on the cooperation of a large number of enterprises of different size but all distinguished by a high technological level and industrial prestige.
KOMMUNAL 4.0
kommunal4null-ev.de
Kommunal 4.0 e.V. is the association for the promotion of digitization in municipal infrastructures, mainly in the water sector. As water and water resources are a key focus area for local and global development, FIWARE’s technology competence in Smart Cities infrastructure and sensor technology will greatly complement Kommunal 4.0 efforts.
NEXT DATA SERVICE AG
https://www.next-data-service.com
NEXT Data Service AG offers individual solutions in the fields of data science, machine learning, big data, web and social analytics, computer vision and image recognition as well as solutions for classification, clustering, and prediction. As an innovation partner, NEXT sustainably carries the business of its clients into the future and acts as a constant companion, initiator and active developer. The team has experience in search engines, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, semantic analyses, big data, software development and in strategic and operational consulting for companies with a high level of implementation competence in corporate groups and medium-sized companies.
SIBB E.V.
sibb.de
SIBB e.V. is the association for companies in the IT and Internet industries in Berlin and Brandenburg. SIBB plans to work jointly with the FIWARE Foundation and to extend the FIWARE technology stack through the implementation of a number of solutions for cities and industry. SIBB members will benefit in three ways:
1. using the FIWARE framework for smooth and innovative product-building
2. using the FIWARE community to reach out to new customers
3. using the FIWARE standards in order to cost-effective and scalable implementation
FIWARE is looking forward to cooperating with the technology experts of on common goals, materializing the FIWARE mission.
Dr. Mathias Petri, a Board Member of the SIBB Forum Digital Platforms & Technologies and CEO of StoneOne AG, commented on the cooperation agreement: “One of SIBB’s core concerns is to network the players in our sector, but also to jointly address the specific needs of our customers, for example in the public sector or manufacturing companies. The keyword here is “Industry 4.0″. The cooperation with the FIWARE Foundation is a perfect fit for this claim, as it enables us to support our members and their customers with state-of-the-art technologies and know-how. The provision of open source development modules based and standards is an important cornerstone. Internationality is also important to us because unfortunately, various countries are still well ahead of us in international comparison. Here we can benefit from the worldwide network and excellent use cases of the FIWARE Foundation in the capital region and accelerate digitization locally”.
SMART CITY ASSOCIATION ITALY
thesmartcityassociation.org
The Smart City Italy Association aims to drive the digitalisation and digital transformation of Italian cities, strongly believing that digitalisation means individual growth and collective well-being. Cities benefit from close collaboration with providers of new, innovative and interoperable solutions, such as Standard Data Models, Interoperable Frameworks and Generic Architecture Models.
TIKAL TECHNOLOGIES SL
https://www.naevatec.com
Naeva Tec is a technology company specialized in the design, development, implementation, and support of innovative solutions in the field of Next Generation Networks (NGN – Next Generation Networks) and Future Internet. The hallmark of Naeva Tec is the R & D, a philosophy that allows them to be partakers of the latest trends in the IT sector. Which ensures full adaptation of our solutions to the highest technological standards.
WAZIUP E.V.
waziup.eu
The Open Innovation Platform for IoT and Big-Data in Sub-Saharan Africa is a role model for a continent-wide collaboration effort similar to the FIWARE approach: building communities around technologies in order to enable change and adoption. WAZIUP is joining the FIWARE Foundation with the goal to increase impact and cooperate more closely in the technology sector, thus reaching out globally to harness the potential of underdeveloped countries.
Dr.-Ing. Abdur Rahim, Managing Director of WAZIUP e.V. said of future plans and objectives: “We are working to create the Pan-African IoT tech communities as well as the social entrepreneurial ecosystem in partnership with the local Tech Hubs. We provide IoT hardware and software technical capacity for the hubs, developers, entrepreneurs for rapid prototyping of the applications based on our highly affordable, open source WAZIUP IoT technologies based on FIWARE Context Broker.”
