Ericsson announces global IoT partnership with SK Holdings

Swedish networking company Ericsson has announced the establishment of a collaboration partnership with Korean tech conglomerate SK Holdings to develop a global ICT ecosystem that will support Ericsson’s IoT platform.

SK Holdings is the owner of one of Korea’s major operators – SK Telecom – but also has interests a number of other areas of ICT. “Drawing from our strength in ICT services and solutions, we will enhance ICT competitiveness and strengthen our presence in global markets by forging partnerships with leading global companies in the areas of IoT, cloud networks and Big Data,” said Park Jung-ho, CEO of SK Holdings. “We will create a strong collaborative ecosystem with global ICT and solution companies for our global target markets and target industries.”

“Our IoT platform has opened up great opportunities for businesses across industries,” said Ericsson CEO Hans Vestberg. “We look forward to working together with SK Holdings C&C to build a strong ICT ecosystem to realize and capture the benefits of the Networked Society.”

The actual announcement concerned the signing of an ‘extensive memorandum of understanding’ on 12 August. It committed the two companies to jointly develop IoT platforms specialized for certain industries, such as healthcare and transportation. In that sense it seems to be an extension of Ericsson’s recently announced strategy to diversify beyond telecoms. The two companies will also collaborate on other new ICT services, as well as security solutions that encompass both networks and data.

In other IoT partnership news Stream Technologies, which provides the IoT-X platform for managing connected devices, has got together with Link Labs, which specialises in developing LoRa networks, to develop a LoRa IoT platform.

“Link Labs are a perfect partner for deploying LoRa carrier grade LPWA networks,” said Tracy Hopkins, SVP of Low Power Networks for Stream Technologies. “Not only do they support the LoRaWAN open ecosystem and like Stream are active members of the LoRa Alliance, they also have Symphony Link which offers a different feature set for private networks… In this complex ’market of markets’, partnerships that make deployment simple and deliver on the business model are the very key to success.”

“We are very excited to be working with Stream’s IoT-X platform to bridge the gap between Link Labs’ LoRa Symphony Link networks and other IoT and M2M technologies,” said Bryan Eagle, VP of Biz Dev and Marketing at Link Labs. “Having simple, ease of management across multiple networks is a huge benefit for our customers. They deploy different technologies for different applications but want a single platform to manage them and Stream can deliver that.”