The Frost & Sullivan Awards recognize companies that demonstrate best practices in their industry, commending the diligence, commitment, and innovative business strategies required to advance in the global marketplace. The 2012 Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation Awards are based on an independent analysis of the European vehicular communication market. The award recognizes NEC's leadership in this market throughout the past 4 years and its unique potential for the upcoming mass market introduction of products.
Specifically, Frost & Sullivan has recognized NEC's vehicular communications system, which including the LinkBird-MX communication hardware platform and NEC's C2XSoftware Development Kit. This system has been employed in cooperative projects and trials with car manufactures across Europe since 2008. It has been optimized over the years to augment interoperability and standard compliance as well as to enhance its functionalities based on trial results. Recently, the system has been enhanced to support energy-efficient driving applications in the European project eCoMove and is currently also adopted in the European large-scale trial DriveC2X.
The platform can be deployed as an On-Board Unit (OBU) or Road-Side Unit (RSU) and has achieved significant recognition in the European ITS industry, where its customers range from leading car manufactures to road equipment integrators.
According to Frost & Sullivan's analysis, NEC's vehicular communications system outperformed the competitors in all 5 benchmarking criteria adopted in the decision support matrix: innovative elements of the product, leveraging of leading-edge technologies in the product, value added features/benefits, increased customer ROI and customer acquisition/penetration potential.
Leveraging the technology and expertise gained with LinkBird-MX and C2X-SDK, NEC announced at ITS World Congress in Vienna, October 2012, the 2015 target roll-out of an evolution of LinkBird-MX into a smaller component for a wider audience reach, supporting the Car2Car Communication Consortium goal of deploying cooperative systems in Europe starting from 2015.