Kubota Corporation, one of Japan's leading manufacturing corporations, has teamed up with the country's largest telco NTT to develop IT solutions designed enhance Japan's agricultural competitiveness.
The agreement involves parent company Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and its enterprise and corporate communications arm, NTT Communications Corporation (NTT Com) and other NTT group companies.
The participants plan to combine Kubota's infrastructure solutions for agriculture and water management, NTT's research and development capabilities and ICT services from NTT group companies.
R&D will 'focus on creating agricultural solutions that enable farms to better visualize and manage their agricultural businesses, including through enhanced efficiency and automation, and water solutions that enable extra-efficient monitoring and management of water resources,' Kubota says.
The solutions will incorporate advanced agricultural machinery, farm-support systems and water infrastructure from Kubota; global cloud and security services from NTT Com; wireless technologies, weather and map information and other ICT services from the NTT Group; artificial intelligence, including the Corevo failure-detection system leveraging AI and IoT technologies developed by NTT for the Internet of Things and big data.
Kubota says it is accelerating its global businesses in the areas of agriculture machinery and water management under a business restructuring strategy named '˜Global Major Brand Kubota'. The company is strengthening its development of agricultural technologies and solutions, such as the Kubota Smart Agri System that leverages ICT for enhanced agricultural management.
NTT has launched a number of ""Co-Innovation"" initiatives, one of which is in agriculture, where it is partnering with other companies.