US IoT company Lilee Systems is poised to enter the Australian market with a focus on the transportation sector using its just released TransAir STS Gateway fog computing and communications devices.
The company, founded in 2009, says its mission is to create ‘Connectivity in Motion’ by merging multiple wireless connections into a predictable, stable and manageable network.
Its initial focus was on providing robust wide-area communications to the rail transport industry and it has since expanded into the wider IoT market with its own cloud-based IoT platform T-Cloud, but with a strong focus still on the transport sector.
Lilee Systems wants partners
Jessica Sweeney, Lilee Systems’ senior director of market and product strategy, told IoTAustralia that the company was looking for organisations to represent it in specific industry verticals ahead of creating a presence in Australia if its strategy proves successful.
“I believe the smart way to enter the market is to have the presence follow the opportunity. We are looking to establish a beachhead and have the staffing follow. With the horizontal solution we have, we think our best opportunity for growth is finding key local partners that are looking at solutions they can present to their local customers.”
Lilee Systems’ regional HQ is in Taiwan, and Sweeney said Lilee saw Australia as its main opportunity for growth. “Australian GDP is expected to be one of the fastest growing in the world and I think smart commuting technology is key to enabling that growth.”
She added: “The ink is not quite dry but we are talking to a partner in Brisbane in the road transport market and we are talking to others. The two sectors I want to focus on are fleet vehicles and urban and regional transit.”
Smart commuting – a new market?
Smart computing, Sweeney explained, is the provision of communications on commuter transport that are as good as, or almost as good as, those in the commuters’ offices.
“WeDriveU is a corporate shuttle bus operator in the Bay Area of San Francisco. It uses Lilee hardware and software to offer extremely high bandwidth, high reliability on-board WiFi so its corporate customers can offer their commuting employees a communications experience that is essentially indistinguishable from what they have in the office.”
She sees Australia as particularly ripe for this kind of service. “Where you have a large number of people who have to travel long distances such as to the Pilbara there’s an opportunity to turn that into productive time through ‘campus in motion’ with reliable WiFi: or even to attract better talent.”
An IoT gateway on steroids?
Key to the company’s assault on the Australian market will be its TransAir STS Gateway product released earlier this month at InnoTrans 2016 in Berlin. According to Sweeny, it has the most compact form factor more interfaces than anything else on the market.
“We have LTE-Advanced globally. We plan to certify in all our key markets. You can have up to four SIMs so you can split traffic between two different carriers and load balance between them. It has 802.11ac WiFi, both northbound and southbound.
“And we have combined it with fog computing. It is an industry grade PC. We have two drive bays. You can put in the largest solid state drives you can buy, so you can have terabytes of storage. It runs Linux, Android or Windows. We have not found another platform that can run Windows, and most of the CCTV recording apps are windows apps. So we can do the video recording on the server in the field. We see transport as one of the key use cases.”
The device also incorporates a 3-axis gyroscope, 3-axis accelerometer and support for GPS, Glonass, Beidou and Galileo satellite navigation systems.
Sweeney added: We wanted to provide the most diverse options to our customers so they could pull together the bits they need to solve the problems that are most important to them.”
“It also has an ODB interface so you can plug in engine performance data, feed that to the cloud and make it available to your predictive maintenance systems.
Lilee Systems also names retail franchises as a target market for the product. Sweeney said: “We are seeing ain increasing move towards a store-within-a-store — a kiosk for a specific product in a larger store — and making that very easy to deploy and manage is something we are focussed on.”
