Today, EdgeX Foundry announced Samsung Electronics has joined as a Platinum member to help accelerate open source development of their industrial IoT edge platform. You can view the complete news release here.
We had the chance to sit down with Kyeongwoon Lee, Senior Vice President for Samsung Electronics, to discuss why they joined the EdgeX community and how they will be using the framework.
What is your your role within Samsung?
I am one of the core contributors and enablers for Samsung’s IoT business in terms of connectivity with our variety of products. By working with the IoT ecosystem, I am very active in the open source community and leverage different standards such as Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF) and IoTivity.
What is Samsung’s vision for Industrial IoT?
Our traditional portfolio includes Consumer Electronics (CE), Information technology & Mobile Communications (IM) and Device Solutions (DS). But there is a lot of potential in Industrial IoT (IIoT), such as Smart Manufacturing, Smart Building and Smart Lighting and Smart Energy Management, and we believe we need to build a synergy and true seamless interoperable IoT services across the business domains. As one of the biggest manufacturing companies around the world, we have many infrastructures and a lot of experiences but, if we collaborate with EdgeX Foundry, we believe that our IIoT efforts will be much more clear and stronger. We will be able to continue building and growing an IIoT business.
What are some of the business or technical challenges you have faced when developing IoT edge solutions? How have you overcome them?
The biggest technical challenge is interoperability. There are a variety of devices in factories that are part of proprietary solutions and aren’t talking to each other. Even in global standardization, there are still Brownfield areas that are used by proprietary solutions which makes interoperability a challenge. The other challenges are scalability and flexibility. For example, real-time operations is very important and in order to meet performance criteria, we need scalability.
We’ve overcome some of these challenges by working with open source such as IoTivity, and leveraging some of the IoT standards like OCF. In addition to this, when it comes to the IIoT ecosystem, we need more flexibility per vertical specific use case, so that we could expect the faster and more optimized deployment. We believe that the best answer is to collaborate on a pure open source platform that is vendor neutral and can work with existing technologies and services. This will help us deploy the very best to the industry and developers.
Why is Samsung joining EdgeX Foundry?
We are attracted to EdgeX Foundry’s value proposition and recognize that it is the best solution for several of our challenges – interoperability, scalability, flexibility and transparency to existing cloud services. EdgeX Foundry will help us create lightweight edge solutions with the support a growing community with Industrial IoT edge platform expertise.
How are you planning to use the EdgeX framework? How do you think it will help you achieve your business goals?
EdgeX Foundry will help Samsung create interoperable and lightweight edge solutions that will help us grow and strengthen our presence in Industrial IoT.
