Mobile edge computing, partner ecosystems will be key to the future of smart cities, experts say
AUSTIN, Texas—Tyson Tuttle, CEO of Silicon Labs and moderator of a panel this week at the Smart Cities Innovation Summit, says of smart cities, “The technology is there. That’s not really the biggest challenge. It’s really about taking these technologies and really deploying them out into these new applications.”
That optimistic view was discussed with representatives from AT&T, HPE, Cisco and the city of Austin’s public power utility.
Tom Bradicich, GM and VP of servers and IoT systems for HPE hit on a number of topics as imperatives for smart city success including security, bandwidth, cost, latency, compliance, data sovereignity and mobile edge computing, the last of which he spoke about in more detail.
“There is a big focus on the edge at our company,” he said, noting HPE’s experience in compute power and data acquisition, “so that insights could be derived at the edge instead of connecting back to the cloud. It leverages our existing assets. We’re shifting those out to the edge to gain these real time responses and benefits.”
Amr Salem, global GTM for smart cities at Cisco, stressed the need for a robust partner ecosystem that ranges from buy-in by local political leaders, all the way to application developers.
“One of the things that’s very important is what we call smart regulation. The cities have to think in this journey how to govern differently. They communicate vertically. That value chain needs to be deconstructed. There has to be a middle layer that allows for any sensor to talk to any application. Any application needs access to data coming from any sensor on the ground.”
Salem continued: “With all the data that cities have, there is something called open data to make the data available for the innovators that live in the city, all the small business, all the startups. Give them access to the data and they will come up with the applications. This way you’re creating an economy over and avove the fact that you’re managing your city more efficiently. “
