In a recent announcement, Actility and HERE Technologies announced a partnership that is designed to improve the location capabilities of IoT solutions by pinpointing the position of assets accurately, seamlessly and continuously in both indoor and outdoor environments.
Combining Actility’s LoRaWAN connectivity management platform and HERE positioning capabilities, this integration will give Actility customers more cost-effective, energy efficient and sustainable solutions for asset management in logistics and supply chain applications across industries.
The combined solution can locate any asset, such as a tool or piece of equipment, with minimal energy consumption and low cost of ownership, bringing plant-to-store goods tracking or industrial supply chain transparency to life.
“Through our new partnership with Actility, we continue to increase our capabilities and presence in the IoT market,” said Francois Fortun, Head of Business Development of IoT Partner Ecosystem, HERE. “HERE is a worldwide leader in mapping and location services, providing the highest levels of accuracy and global coverage, and our ongoing growth in this market underscores our position as the go-to location services provider for IoT technology.”
Actility is a leader in LoRaWAN connectivity solutions. LoRaWAN is a low-power wireless protocol for wide area networks that allows devices to communicate with IoT applications over long-range wireless connections and with an extended battery life. Actility powers more than 50 service providers in over 30 countries and enables managed enterprise networks for dedicated vertical IoT solutions. As a result, Actility can enable multi-country geolocation solutions using its LoRaWAN roaming hub and Abeeway, its subsidiary that makes low-power, long-life trackers.
Through its partnership with HERE, Actility brings a complete low-power location solution to the market that combines GPS, A-GPS and Wi-Fi positioning. HERE venue mapping and “fingerprinting” (information about the current set of Wi-Fi signals and signal strengths available to a mobile device at a given moment) capabilities significantly improve indoor positioning precision, with an accuracy of five to seven meters.
“Asset tracking is a strategic market for Actility, especially since our acquisition of Abeeway last year, which strengthened our solution portfolio with a LoRaWAN tracking device,” said Olivier Hersent, CEO, Actility. “Today, we are very enthusiastic to join forces with HERE to fill what we believe to be a gap in the market: multi-country, low-power geolocation solutions with increased accuracy in almost every situation and a compelling business case based on low TCO.”
Ken Briodagh is a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience under his belt. He is in love with technology and if he had his druthers would beta test everything from shoe phones to flying cars.
