Huawei announces collaboration with Honeywell to develop smart building offerings

At CeBIT 2017, the world's largest ICT exhibition, Huawei announced that it is collaborating with Honeywell to bring to market smart building offerings that take advantage of the latest Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to help make buildings more sustainable, secure and energy efficient.

Through the collaboration, the two companies will jointly pursue large-scale smart city projects globally to help city administrators build intelligent urban infrastructures that enable them to control costs while making their cities desirable and livable for their residents.

For example, Huawei and Honeywell recently worked together on the Longgang Smart City project in the district of Shenzhen, China. Honeywell provided traditional building automation systems for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), security and fire infrastructure, as well as the connected building solutions to integrate all sub-systems for a building management dashboard, alarm management, work order management for efficient facility management, quick response and preventive maintenance. Huawei provided ICT infrastructures including data centers, security protection and monitoring, IoT gateways and cloud services.

An important building block of the collaboration is a new IoT Gateway Huawei is working on. It is built on Tridium’s Niagara Framework® and collects and analyzes data from buildings to provide detection, deduction, determination and decision-making capabilities to customers. Tridium is an independent business of Honeywell.

The solution will greatly improve building intelligence by providing functions such as access control, intrusion monitoring, and disaster detection in the security and safety field. The Gateway offers energy saving features, with functions like cooling and heating control, natural resource usage, and electric appliance management. It also provides illumination, transportation, and communication control for efficiency and convenience, while also providing customers with an innovative solution for more sustainable, secure and energy efficient connected buildings.

Developed by Huawei, the Gateway marks the successful implementation of the Huawei Edge-Computing-IoT (EC-IoT) Solution for the building industry. The solution combines Huawei’s IoT gateway (AR502 Series) and Agile Controller, Tridium’s Niagara Framework® (IoT middleware platform), together with various sensors, control devices, and a building management system from other partners. It enables uniform interconnection and interworking between various sensors and control devices, manages tens of millions of IoT terminals on the cloud, and supports the distributed deployment and scalability of the building management system.

Huawei has collaborated with Honeywell for several years to jointly explore cooperation in the fields of smart cities, connected buildings, smart energy and industrial IoT. The two companies have agreed to jointly explore business opportunities in China and other high growth regions, including the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa. Honeywell is a partner in Huawei’s Enterprise Solution Partner Program, which provides participating companies access to Huawei’s open API, global expert support, and lab resources in support of the companies’ strategies to help customers deploy technologies to provide more connected, safe and cleaner buildings, homes and cities.

Kevin Hu, President of Huawei Switch & Enterprise Gateway Product Line, said: "Being Fortune 500 enterprises with strong R&D and innovation capabilities, Huawei and Honeywell are both committed to creating products and solutions that address our customer needs and allow them to take full advantage of the benefits associated with digital transformation. The Huawei Smart Building Solution will deliver higher quality services to global customers, bring more energy efficient and smarter buildings."

David Zhang, Vice President for Engineering and Technology Greater China and Asia Pacific, Honeywell Home and Building Technologies business, said: "Honeywell has been collaborating with Huawei for several years to address the connected buildings market globally. Huawei’s new IoT Gateway offering is the result of collaborative innovation in the building automation field. I believe this mutually beneficial cooperation between our companies will benefit building owners by offering them rapid integration capabilities of building automation technologies."

The Huawei EC-IoT gateway provides a variety of IoT interfaces, adapts to various building access scenarios, and unifies access and management for sub-systems such as illumination, safety, power distribution and measuring, HVAC, and electric appliance control. With open technology, the gateway can have Niagara software easily installed and can adapt to over 1,000 types of industry protocols.

The gateway supports various forms of intelligence controls, in addition to distributed and scalable deployment modes. With edge computing capabilities, it delivers value-added services including data aggregation, security and privacy protection, real-time service response, and edge intelligence analysis. The Agile Controller centrally manages tens of millions of IoT terminals on the cloud, and achieves collaboration of resources including terminals, connections, computing, and applications.

Huawei has industry-leading technologies and solutions in the communications field, while Honeywell’s building automation technologies can be found in more than 10 million buildings globally. Integrating Huawei's technological strengths with those of Honeywell and leveraging powerful channel and ecosystem advantages, the solution will be rolled out in key markets including China, Southeast Asia, South Pacific, and Western Europe across a range of commercial buildings, as well as education, enterprise and industrial campuses.

To this day, Huawei EC-IoT Solution has been successfully applied to multiple vertical industries on a large scale like the smart electricity, lighting, elevator and building industries, providing convenient services to billions of people around the globe. Huawei is committed to investing and innovating in the IoT field, to ultimately advance the digital transformation of enterprises and industries.