An American giant collaborating with a Chinese behemoth – a win-win situation for us all?

Honeywell has tied up with Huawei to develop smart building offerings around the world

At the CeBIT 2017 event, Chinese multinational Huawei announced its collaboration with Honeywell to offer smart building offerings that will take the help of the Internet of Things technology to truly revolutionise the Energy Management System (EMS) Market. Both companies are trying to make buildings more energy efficient, safe and secure. By entering into a strategic partnership, the two global titans will take up large-scale smart city projects around the world to assist city administrative officials in creating intelligent urban infrastructure. This should go a long way in making cities more liveable and desirable for their inhabitants. Honeywell and Huawei recently joined hands on the Longgang Smart City project in Shenzhen, China. Honeywell built the fire and security infrastructure, alarm management, preventive maintenance, quick response, efficient facility management, building management dashboard sub-system integration, and conventional HVAC building automation systems. Huawei worked on the information and communication technologies such as the IoT gateways, cloud services, security monitoring, and the data centre.

A critical component of the alliance is a new IoT gateway unveiled by Huawei. It is based on Tridium's Niagara Frameworkand gathers and analyses data from different buildings to provide the deduction, detection, and decision-making capability to customers. Honeywell runs Tridium as an independent business and this solution will dramatically improve building intelligence by enabling functions such as intrusion monitoring, disaster detection, and access monitoring in the field of safety and security. The gateway provides energy saving with features such as heating and cooling control, electric appliance management, and natural resource usage. The gateway is also able to deliver communication, illumination and transportation control for convenience and efficiency, along with providing customers with a unique solution for secure, energy-efficient and more sustainable connected buildings.

The gateway is symbolic of the success of the Huawei Edge-Computing-IoT solution for the purpose of smart buildings. The solution is a combination of Tridium's Niagara Framework with Huawei's IoT Agile Controller and gateway, in tandem with a number of control devices, a building management system, and sensors from different partners. The solution allows uniform interworking and interconnection between diverse control devices and sensors, manages millions of Internet of Things terminals on the cloud, and facilitates the distributed scalability and distribution of a building management system.

Honeywell has worked with Huawei for several years now to explore joint opportunities in the field of connected buildings, industrial IoT, smart cities, and smart energy. The two companies have agreed to tap the Chinese market and other high-growth areas such as the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. Honeywell is a key partner in the Enterprise Solution Partner Program of Huawei that provides companies access to Huawei's global support network, lab resources, and open API to support the company’s strategies to enable their customers to deploy technologies for safer, cleaner, and better-connected homes and cities.