Third IoT World Forum showcases Smart City Technologies

As the host city of the third annual Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) industry event, taking place December 6-8, Dubai will be a showcase for more than 20 digital city and connected industry solution deployments made possible by Cisco and the IoT industry.

Through a series of smart city experience tours, IoTWF attendees will see why Dubai is touted as one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. To expand upon last year’s IoTWF in Chicago, Dubai is featuring twice as many solutions than were featured at the 2014 event.

The deployments featured in the tours will include services such as connected parking, connected lighting and waste management, alongside other vertical industries. More importantly, attendees will have the opportunity to visualize these solutions as not only connected but interconnected and able to share data.

In Dubai’s Command and Control Center, nearly all the solutions are integrated into a digital platform as part of Cisco Smart+Connected Communities. The digital platform can aggregate data from various sensors, solutions, and partner applications; conduct advanced data analytics; and supports a wide spectrum of urban services.

According to Anil Menon, President, Smart+Connected Communities, Cisco,“We have passed the incubation phase, now IoT/smart city solutions are ready to be scaled. Cities who scale first will be the winners in an increasingly competitive environment. As host to the 2015 IoTWF, Dubai is rapidly transforming into becoming one of the smartest digital cities in the world connecting the unconnected through the power of intelligent networks.”

Beyond Dubai, utilizing the digital platform in conjunction with the portfolio of Smart+Connected Communities solutions are helping cities being to achieve their digital transformation goals. For instance, a number of cities have made strides in reaching their COP21 climate goals by reducing traffic, encouraging greater use of public transit and streamlining the delivery of services to citizens.

Kansas City, MO in the US, Adelaide in Australia, Hamburg, Germany and Bangalore in India, for instance, have already begun using a single digital data platform for managing their urban services.

Now more than ever, cities are required to capture and analyze data coming from the many sensors, cameras and mobile devices in use. They are employing new analytics techniques, such as fog computing, that is able to gather, process, and conduct analysis right at the edge of a network, where it can be acted upon more immediately.

To accelerate the deployment of fog technologies, a coalition of Internet of Things leaders recently announced the formation of the OpenFog Consortium. It aims to enable end-to-end technology scenarios for the Internet of Things through the development of an open architecture, core technologies including the capabilities of distributed computing, networking, and storage as well as the leadership needed to realize the full potential of IoT. Cisco is a founding member of the newly formed consortium.