Tokyo, Japan, February 4, 2020 – T-Gaia Corporation (Shibuya-ku, Tokyo; President: Nobutaka Kanaji) and Relay2, Inc. (CEO Eric Chen, California, USA, “Relay2”) formed a capital and business alliance on the assumption of exclusive distribution in Japanese market. The amount of investment is not disclosed. As part of the alliance, T-Gaia plans to start selling Relay2 products and services in the Japanese market.
Background and future strategy
With edge solutions, which keep business data within an organization’s facilities, businesses are recognizing the potential for improve network economics, security, and real-time processing compared to uploading and processing all data in the cloud. A quickly growing field, the enterprise market is beginning to look closer at how edge computing can fit into their operations.
T-Gaia has provided a variety of solutions related to smart devices to their corporate customers. In recent years, they have started to offer network equipment provisioning, network design and implementation, and remote network monitoring services.
The products of Relay2 are high-performance network equipment and have the integrated ability to perform on-premise edge compute processing and on device data storage. This has applications across many verticals. In retail, restaurants, stores, and malls, the solution enables the analysis and utilization of in-store data by using IoT. In hotels and hospitals, on-demand video for digital signage can efficiently be delivered, and in classrooms using digital teaching materials, the edge solution can be very effective for sharing content with students. In the future, T-Gaia plans to use Relay2 technology as a building block to develop new and unique solution businesses built on the network business while strengthening cooperation with business partners.
Strength of Relay2 products
With the Relay2 solution, Wi-Fi access points all serve as on-premise edge servers. This will provide benefits to many businesses, regardless of industry. Compared to uploading all business data to the cloud, network communication and cloud usage fees can be greatly reduced, and because it is a network device, it easily can link with smart devices and PCs already existing in the corporate environment.
For example, a problem faced by many business IT teams is the simultaneous update of Windows on employee PCs. Depending on the business network and internet capabilities, this can easily occupy the company’s entire Internet bandwidth, and could impact essential daily business operation while the updates are processing. To mitigate against this, businesses can opt to deploy and operate a dedicated Windows Update server in-house. However, this is very costly. With the Relay2 product and it’s edge compute and storage capability, Windows 10 updates can be automatically cached on the WiFi access points — eliminating the need for a dedicated (and expensive) update server. The Relay2 access points installed at the business’ facilities, serve the update to connected PC directly, and thereby reduces the update time and saves the Internet bandwidth usage costs so that businesses can smoothly continue their daily operations.
In educational settings, such as school classes and seminars, the Relay2 access point also make it possible to store digital materials on the access point via a cache function or download in-advance function. During the class, many students need to access a common set of digital teaching materials including large videos. Using the Relay2 solution, students connect to the WiFi network and the material is downloaded directly from the access point. Compared to not having on-AP caching, so class material has to be fetched from the cloud, the Internet bandwidth is substantially reduced and at the same time many more students can access the materials comfortably. Beyond the classroom, similar principles enable services for content distribution to signage and on-demand viewing can be deployed that enable comfortable viewing while controlling communication bandwidth and communication costs.
Future strategies
With today’s announcement, T-Gaia will promote the product sales of Relay2, and strengthen its network deployment, operation, and maintenance business. In the future, T-Gaia will promote the development of solutions for each industry harnessing the edge by cooperating with partner companies and its investment companies.
About T-Gaia
Corporate site URL: https://www.t-gaia.co.jp/
Founded: February 1992
Capital: 3,154 million yen
Representative: Nobutaka Kanaji, CEO
Head office location: 4-1-18 Ebisu, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
Business description: (1) Sales of mobile phones, etc. and agency business. (2) Sales agency services for communication services such as solutions and broadband. (3) Settlement services and other new business operations
Press Inquiries:
T-Gaia Co., Ltd. Corporate Planning Dept.; Tel： 03-6409-1010; E-mail： tg-kouhou-ir@t-gaia.co.jp
About Relay2
Relay2 has developed a unique WiFi access and edge computing platform designed to enable Mobile Network Operators, Wireline Carriers and Managed Service Providers to create and monetize horizontal and vertical business applications and services on top of a high-performance, cloud managed WiFi network. Relay2 provides the only WiFi network solution with the ability to host rich multimedia content like video and presentations as well as custom Applications directly on their Access Points. This approach eliminates latencies and lowers backhaul traffic requirements by delivering content directly from the AP to the connected WiFi device.
Relay2 was founded in 2011 by technology leaders with backgrounds at Cisco, Juniper Networks, Nokia and Siemens, and is backed by internationally recognized, top-tier Silicon Valley venture capital firms.
