Nasscom launches India's first IoT lab

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) has launched India's first Centre of Excellence - Internet of Things (CoE- IoT) at the Nasscom Startups Warehouse in Bengaluru.

Union minister for law Ravi Shankar Prasad inaugurated the center on Thursday.

The CoE will focus on leveraging IT strengths and creating a new age industry with the support of IoT-based ideas, Nasscom stated in a release.

The market for IoT has witnessed growth of 28 per cent between FY2015 and FY2016, according to Nasscom. There are nearly 120 firms offering IoT solutions in India and around 60 per cent IoT startups emerged post 2010, it adds.

Indian IoT firms received around $60 million funding in the last 3 years, which projects that the Indian IoT market is expected to be worth $15 billion by 2020, accounting for nearly 5 per cent of global market.

''We are pleased on launching the IoT Centre of Excellence, which takes forward our efforts towards establishing India as a global tech hub. This centre of excellence has been created to act as a catalyst for developing the IoT SME/startup ecosystem of the country as well as an accelerator of IoT capabilities providing the concept and scale for industrial and societal needs. The CoE will also function as an enabler of funding, accelerating, mentoring and enterprise for the key emerging IoT startups who have been selected for incubation, after a rigorous process,'' R Chandrashekhar, president, Nasscom, stated.

CoE-IoT is a joint initiative between the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (Deity), Education and Research Network (ERNET) and Nasscom. The CoE is also supported by Accenture, Cisco, Cyient, EMC, Intel, HCL Technologies, Qualcomm, Tata Consultancy Services, L&T Technology Services, Robert Bosch and VM Ware as Strategic partners. Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, IBM, Microsoft have signed up as infrastructure partner to the initiative.

''IoT is one of the high growth potential areas in the IT sector. With the growing number of IoT-based SMEs/startups in the Indian market, it becomes imperative to create an enabling ecosystem to help evolve this space, empowering companies to build technologies that provide global solutions,'' Ajay Kumar, additional secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), said.

''Paradigm shift from IT to IOT, together with smooth shift of data & utilities using different electronic hardware structured with analytics, is going to enable a smart integrated & networked world. We are happy to partner with Nasscom, which is bringing-in Industry to help democratize innovation, by creating Centre of Excellence (COE) for start-ups in PPP mode,'' Neena Pahuja, director general, Education and Research Network, (ERNET), added.

The CoE laboratory along with the Nasscom 10,000 Startups Warehouse has the capacity to incubate up to 40 startups and can accommodate around 10 emerging companies per shift for prototype/ design and usage of lab facilities. The CoE also provides a separate space for validation, verification and demonstration as well as concept labs for developing IoT solutions for application areas like Agriculture, Automobile, Telecom, Healthcare and Consumer IoT.

Multiple IoT based firms will be selected from over 250 entries to be incubated at the CoE, through a roadshow held across Coimbatore, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad and Mumbai. The first five companies out of the total entries are Wireless Controls, Uncanny Vision, LightMetrics, ThingsCloud and SAAR Microsystems.

The Internet of Things, which connects cars, homes, wearables, and everyday objects to the cloud, is a hot tech topic these days. Chipmakers such as Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) and Intel are expanding into the space to diversify away from their core chip businesses.

Smartphone makers such as Samsung and Apple are entering the wearables and smart home markets to expand their mobile ecosystems.

Networking giant Cisco estimates that the number of connected devices worldwide will rise from 15 billion today to 50 billion by 2020. Intel is even more bullish, claiming that over 200 billion devices will be connected by then.

All those connected devices will need optimised networking hardware, software, and processors. Cisco has introduced scalable solutions for deploying IoT systems, created analytics systems that analyse the accumulated data, and beefed up its cybersecurity portfolio to counter new threats. Intel and Qualcomm have both launched low-power IoT chips for wearables, drones, and other connected devices.

Research firm IDC estimates that global spending on IoT devices and services will rise from $656 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020. That growth is expected to be fueled by growth in devices, connectivity solutions, and IT services.