MUMBAI: Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) is at it again and the competition better watch out. The company is gearing up to harness the internet of things (IoT). It is focussing first on enterprises and industries while also initiating talks with car manufacturers and consumer durable companies.
The company has hired Ayush Sharma from the Silicon Valley as senior vice president of engineering and technology to drive the business around IoT and other technologies such as mobile edge computing, distributed artificial intelligence and blockchain.
“Jio is looking at these technologies to enable the world’s largest programmable network with alternate technologies available,” Sharma said. “It will take at least around a year to enable consumer IoT but the large focus is on enterprise IoT. We are working on specific use cases.”
Sharma has joined the company after working on his own venture, MotoJeannie, in the US. He has worked for telecom equipment makers Huawei, Ericsson and Cisco in the past in the US.
Jio’s 4G network will complement IoT for enterprise and industrial use cases that require bandwidth and latency, he said. The company had recently said that it had started offering enterprise solutions along with fibre-to-the-home on a trial basis in a few locations.
“The idea is not just to launch IoT products and solutions for consumer IoT but also for enterprise and industries,” Sharma said, adding that the parent company, Reliance Industries, is looking to use these technologies initially within in-house verticals such as retail and logistics to make them intelligent.
For consumer IoT, Jio is working with a variety of technology vendors and bringing car manufacturers, consumer durables and appliances players, among others, on board to build a complete ecosystem. “We are building our own platform with big data strength,” he said.
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