Mainflux Wins Serbian Innovation Fund Grant To Develop IoT Gateway Powered by the EdgeX Foundry Platform
The Government of Serbia Innovation Fund, has awarded Mainflux a funding grant to develop MFX-1, an IoT edge gateway powered by The Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry platform. An addition of the edge component to the Mainflux IoT Platform will turn it into a unique open source IoT solution capable of both server-side and edge computing.
Projects were evaluated by an independent governance structure, with a robust international peer review system and an international Expert Committee, which awarded Mainflux and 24 other projects, of total 137 applied for the Innovation Fund competition.
Mainflux’ CEO Janko Isidorovic, received the grant at the ceremony organized by the Innovation Fund at the City Assembly of Belgrade.
At the ceremony In the Belgrade City Hall, talks were given by Serbian Minister of Innovation and Technological Development Nenad Popovic, Minister of Innovation and Technological Development, Saša Stojanović, Assistant Minister of Education, Science and Technological Development and Ivan Rakonjac, Director of the Innovation Fund. Talks were also given during the ceremony by Yngve Engstrom, Head of Cooperation at the Delegation of the European Union to Serbia, Maja Andjelković, Senior Private Sector Specialist at the World Bank, and President of the Expert Committee Vladeta Marjanović, who closed the session by talking about the evaluation process. Goran Vesić, City Manager, spoke on behalf of the City of Belgrade.
The innovative projects that received funding cover various industries, mainly in the field of software and application development, information-communication technologies, as well as mechanics and mechanical engineering, new materials, and nanotechnology.
“This grant is a significant contribution to Mainflux and its strategic goal to develop the open-source IoT system which will help resolve issues which are hindering faster adoption of IoT solutions. MFX-1 Gateway based on the EdgeX Foundry platform will bring interoperability to the edge” said Janko Isidorovic. “We are glad that international Expert Committee, recognized importance of the open-source projects for digital transformation of enterprise and industry” emphasized Isidorovic.
Serbian Innovation Fund
Operational since 2011, the Innovation Fund has been a pioneering effort to operationalize and institutionalize Serbian Government “Innovation Imperative Strategy imperative”, first by increasing the capacity of startups and resources available for their growth.
The EU’s support for the Innovation Fund has been instrumental in advancing Serbia’s innovation financing and promoting better integration between the research and private sectors. The Fund is thus an important step towards closer links between Serbia’s and EU’s research communities and innovation ecosystems.
The Mainflux project will be financed by the Innovation Fund from the budget of the Republic of Serbia from the division of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, through the Serbia Competitiveness and Jobs Project (loan agreement with the World Bank).
Mainflux EdgeX-Based IoT Gateway and Mainflux IIoT System
The combination of Mainflux’s IoT platform and its IoT Gateway based on EdgeX will provide a Mainflux IIoT System, leading open source full-featured system for IoT solutions development. EdgeX Foundry is a vendor neutral open source project building a common interoperability framework to facilitate an ecosystem for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing. At the heart of the project is an interoperability framework hosted within a full hardware- and OS-agnostic reference software platform to enable an ecosystem of plug-and-play components that unifies the marketplace and accelerates the deployment of IoT solutions.
Mainflux’s turn-key system will be designed for scale, performance, operational efficiency and the ability to create intelligent products and value-added services across a range of industries.
“It is important to emphasize that MFX-1 IoT Edge Gateway will be powered by The Linux Foundation’s EdgeX Foundry framework”, said Drasko Draskovic, Founder of Mainflux and the chief architect of the Mainflux IoT Platform and MFX-1 gateway. “Although these gateways can be deployed to run on a standard hardware, Mainflux is developing an optimized hardware platform to create an overall low-cost industrial IoT gateway solution” Draskovic added.
“In this way, Mainflux’s IoT platform and its IoT Gateway powered by EdgeX Foundry represents a Mainflux IIoT system that will address important challenges of prevailing distant centralized IoT cloud approach, including bandwidth costs of transmitting the large volumes of data to the cloud, security issues, data transfer latencies and Intermittent cloud connectivity.
Mainflux
Mainflux is a technology company offering a full-stack open-source, patent-free IoT Platform recognized by Linux Foundation and O’Reilly Media with software and hardware consulting services based on extensive working experience in fortune 500 companies.
website: https://www.mainflux.com/
