When it comes to smart cities, it’s all about ‘leveraging municipality relationships.’
“Smart cities,” a term that covers a range of cyberphysical technology deployments dependent on various types of network connectivity, have emerged as an attractive vertical for service providers, vendors and other telecom stakeholders. Based on a sweeping wave of urban growth, creating smart cities is quickly becoming the path to ensuring sustainability and quality-of-life in metropolitan areas.
But what’s the best approach? Aside from the complexity of building smart cities, selling into municipal government, while not new, is very different from a typical enterprise sales cycle. In a recent conversation with Verizon Communications VP of IoT Connected Solutions Mark Bartolomeo, the exec laid out how the telecommunications operator is developing its smart cities business.
“Then we also have our smart cities group, which is really involved around how we use our assets in those markets to provide reliable smart city services to those municipalities,” Bartolomeo said, noting that given Verizon’s network footprint and ongoing communications with civic officials around the country, relationships are key.
“It’s really more focused on leveraging municipality relationships, which is these long term infrastructure relationships. I’ll use Boston to Northern Virginia as an example. Over the past 120 years we’ve connected every house, business, stock exchange, computer … we own all the underground infrastructure, we manage huge content delivery and management services at scale and reliably.”
Bartolomeo gave the example of helping Wall Street financial institutions recover connectivity and productivity following Hurricane Sandy. “There’s lots of adjacent opportunities,” he said.
On the difference between selling to enterprise compared to government, “If you look at the traditional enterprise customer, their decision making is built around regulatory compliance,” Bartolomeo said. For instance, the energy industry defines standards for the national grid, or the railroad industry has standards for train control.
“When we look at the municipalities … they have a responsibility to serve their constituents,” which revolves around absolutes like keeping people safe, ensuring infrastructure is sufficient to maintain and drive economic growth, and make those municipalities an attractive place to live.
A large enterprise, Bartolomeo said, sees an opportunity to deliver a service and create a new revenue stream. “If you’re a municipality, they’re looking of course to operate efficiently, but their primary focus is to serve their constituents.”
