Customer success stories: How Red Hat delivers edge solutions for regional digital operators, smart cities, and industrial automation

When operating at the edge, companies are looking to drive efficiencies and opportunities from their core business. In this roundup of customer success stories, learn how NTT East, FIWARE and ABB chose Red Hat edge solutions to deliver regional marketing insights, create open urban ecosystems and enable enterprise-grade, open source industrial edge applications. 

NTT East creates Video AI Service to deliver community data insights

Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation (NTT East) uses digital technology to help community businesses and organizations address challenges such as declining service levels due to labor shortages or stalled sales growth due to lack of marketing capabilities.

NTT East recently began the Regional Edge with Interconnected Wide-Area Network (REIWA) project to deliver edge computing data analysis to regional businesses and organizations. Local hubs intelligently collect and analyze information, such as point of sale (POS) and consumer purchasing history for retail, product growth status updates for agriculture, and information on disaster evacuation sites and food stockpiles for the government.

With the introduction of NTT East’s Video AI Service, local organizations and businesses can take advantage of the latest AI capabilities to gain proactive insights. For example, footfall measurement artificial intelligence (AI) counts traffic volume to physical stores and provides analysis of visitor attributes such as gender, age, and duration of stay.

NTT East’s Video AI Service uses AI to analyze images and video captured by store cameras. Retailers then use the data to improve marketing, sales, and operational activities. In a store where AI was introduced to measure customer flow, analysis that integrated customer attributes and point of sale (POS) data helped increase sales by 144%. At another store, shoplifting decreased by 30-40% and customer service quality improved, with the help of customer service support AI.

NTT East chose Red Hat OpenShift as the foundation of its Video AI Service to provide automated container orchestration capabilities that simplify deployment, management, and networking at scale. It then worked closely with a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM) and Red Hat Consulting to support its deployment and incorporate best practices based on global examples and experience.

NTT East now plans to continue enhancing its Video AI Service and expand it to new regional data storage locations.

Find out more about NTT East’s journey

FIWARE powers eco-smart cities in collaboration with Red Hat to improve citizens' quality of life

Headquartered in Berlin, FIWARE is a non-profit organization with a mission to build open, sustainable ecosystems around public, royalty-free, and implementation-driven platform standards for the development of smart solutions. Red Hat has been a platinum FIWARE foundation member since 2020, and to date over 250 cities worldwide have adopted FIWARE standards to implement Smart City strategies.

Using scalable, reliable technology unlocks the potential for cities worldwide to innovate, increase sustainability, and improve citizens’ quality of life. Implementing an IoT-enabled digital twin smart city platform allows any city to gather relevant big data from multiple sources, and extract valuable insights to drive smart decisions. The challenge is to effectively gather and process data at a very large scale while building an easy-to-deploy solution that is scalable and secure.

FIWARE worked with HOPU, a Libelium company, one of the most active solution providers in the FIWARE ecosystem, and the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs team to build a production-ready, cloud-native, open source smart city platform based on FIWARE open standards, designed to improve livability and environmental sustainability. HOPU’s air quality sensors collect and process data, while FIWARE’s smart city platform extracts insights that help adopt smarter decisions for the wellbeing of citizens. Red Hat OpenShift also provides the flexibility needed for the smart city platform and base application to deploy on any private or public cloud, improving its scalability and robustness.

The Open Innovation Labs team introduced open practices like impact mapping, event storming, and pair programming to align the team towards shared goals, prioritize outcomes, and integrate and improve smart city technical solutions.

FIWARE Smart Cities is now an attainable, scalable solution that streamlines the developer experience. Today, cities in Spain have implemented this smart solution with different use cases such as air quality sensors, waste collection management, and traffic, demonstrating their commitment to citizens’ wellbeing. The solution will also allow other cities, individual contributors, integrators, or other tech companies to contribute to the Smart Cities platform by adding new use cases to evolve the solution further still.

Red Hat’s work with FIWARE also received an honorable mention from Fast Company’s 2023 World Changing Ideas Awards.

Learn about how FIWARE is accelerating innovation

ABB and Red Hat: Delivering operational excellence at the industrial edge

ABB is a global leader in electrification and automation technology, enabling a more sustainable and resource-efficient future. Its ABB Ability™ portfolio of solutions enable data-driven decisions that lead to safer and smarter operations.

As edge computing pushes the boundaries and capabilities of modern IT, it is becoming increasingly aligned with the requirements of operational technology (OT). As a result, manufacturers are turning to open source technologies to support more agile OT architecture and capture real-time insights at the industrial edge. By integrating into a consistent, composable platform enriched with data to facilitate the development of advanced control systems, these systems can significantly enhance industrial automation by optimizing energy use, increasing production yields, enabling predictive maintenance, and achieving a balance between supply and demand.

The global partnership between Red Hat and ABB was launched to give industries using process automation access to enterprise-grade open source platforms. The latest milestone in this partnership is the availability of ABB Ability™ Edgenius™, which uses Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Device Edge to extend operational consistency for industrial use cases across edge and hybrid cloud environments. Single node OpenShift, Red Hat’s smallest supported Red Hat OpenShift topology, equips ABB Ability™ Edgenius™ with a self-contained node to run at the edge in protected or connect-on-demand mode while Red Hat Device Edge can extend their environment even further to more remote locations with limited resources.

ABB Ability™ Edgenius™ supports a variety of scenarios such as compute, connectivity and high availability, and needs a flexible but consistent platform for a broad range of use cases, including industrial IoT gateways that can securely collect and carry data from production assets to the cloud, and condition monitoring to locally track asset health to ensure plant uptime. The result is flexibility and faster time-to-market using modern principles such as microservices and event-driven architecture.

To meet various operational requirements at the edge, ABB will use foundational capabilities of the Red Hat industrial edge platform. The capacity of Red Hat Device Edge to support small-footprint edge devices will help ABB to more easily connect cloud and control environments. Complementing this, the multi-node high-availability deployment options offered by Red Hat OpenShift also offer greater scalability for edge workloads, regardless of downtime requirements, even accommodating GPU acceleration for onsite image- and video-intensive workloads.

Learn more about the Red Hat and ABB partnership

Conclusion

These three companies are finding efficiencies and insights through the implementation of edge solutions. If you’re interested in hearing from other customers, or in diving deeper into Red Hat’s solutions for edge, visit our edge computing page.