Take the smartest route for your smart city journey with HPE Pointnext Services

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The range of initiatives that cities want to tackle is huge, but most municipalities lack an integrated platform for their data and the tools to fully leverage it. A smart data hub is the answer.

By Nitin Agarwal, HPE Global Smart City Lead

In an important sense, the digital ambitions of cities are not hugely different from those of large enterprises. Cities tend to start initiatives to meet immediate needs, then add more projects, and more, until they come to a point where they realize that these initiatives don’t talk well to each other. As a result, opportunities to cross-relate data and build on it are often lost.

Just like large enterprises – perhaps even more so – cities have very diverse responsibilities and goals. Citizens are looking for all kinds of digital services. They may want easier ways to pay property tax that don’t involve complicated paperwork or, in some locations, queuing up at a government office. Or they may want more emphasis on security, helping police to intervene proactively to prevent incidents from happening. Or more support for local businesses, or improved traffic flow – the list is almost endless. And citizens are not the only constituency. Let’s say you’re a tourist, in town for a week; wouldn’t you want to have all the info you need online and at your fingertips?

To meet these needs as they arise, cities launch point initiatives. There’s nothing wrong with that, and HPE Pointnext Services can certainly help you build whatever project meets your immediate digital needs. But it’s always a good idea to plan ahead for what might come next in your smart city journey. In our experience, the vast majority of municipalities aren’t doing that. They lack an integrated platform for their data and the tools to fully leverage it.

A smart data hub for the smart city

This is where HPE Pointnext Services’ expertise can make a huge difference by creating a central platform where you can aggregate all of the point solutions that you’ve implemented, or that you might implement in the future. A smart city data hub enables you to gather the data, monitor, manage and control it, all in one place. Even if you’re just starting to plan your first smart cities program, or you want to launch a couple of projects to realize some quick benefits, we can help you do that while keeping the big picture in mind. Take a look at the image below.

With all of your data aggregated on a single platform, you have what you need for open data/open government programs. You have the ability to package and present useful information to citizens, academia, businesses and other stakeholders in the ways that are most helpful to them.

A simplified, integrated view of your data

The ability to visualize data easily and perform integrated data analytics are huge advantages. Let’s look at an example that relates traffic flow to environmental impacts – see the image below.

Emissions monitoring (by sensors) and traffic monitoring (by cameras) are typically separate point solutions, handled by different systems and teams. By combining the data as elements in a dashboard, as shown here, you can view the average idle times of vehicles at particular intersections and look for a correlation with emissions levels. This could be very helpful in designing traffic flows or creating policies to reduce the city’s carbon footprint.

Video analytics is often a key component of smart city initiatives that leverage multiple data sources. For example, an Australian organization with responsibilities for water transport wanted to understand the relationship between traffic flow on a river and soil erosion on the banks of the waterway. Video analytics enabled the customer to determine the size and speed of the vessels passing through. By combining that information with data from IoT devices – soil displacement acceleration sensors – the customer was able to build up an accurate picture of the environmental impacts.

Your trusted advisor and integrator

HPE has created a comprehensive reference architecture to help cities implement and connect solutions like these. In addition, we have extensive experience in partnering with third parties to help our customers deploy smart city solutions.

HPE Pointnext Services offers:

• Advisory and transformation services. We work with you to understand the pain points and the opportunities around your smart cities initiatives and create a road map. With transformation workshops, such as our HPE Digital Accelerate Workshops, we accelerate your progress from digital idea to benefit realization. We also bring to the table our deep expertise in digital transformation through our HPE Digital Next Advisory framework.
• Professional services. Once the road map is created, we can help you deploy all of the smart city products you’ll need – whether HPE or non-HPE – to create the end-to-end architecture and roll it out, on time and on budget.
• Operational services. We can handle day-to-day operations and management of the solution for you, optimizing on-premises and cloud workloads and capacity requirements.

Wherever you are in your smart cities journey – whether just getting started, or looking to integrate a wide range of current services – we can help you reach your objectives.

Learn more about technology services consulting from HPE Pointnext Services.

Related resources:

Smart cities: What it takes to build one

Traffic control and digital dolphins: 6 amazing smart city projects

How smart cities handle pandemics

Nitin Agarwal is an HPE Digital Transformation Advisor with over 25 years of industry experience. He loves developing innovative IT solutions to address complex business problems. Nitin has a deep passion for technologies like IoT, IPv6, networking and security. He has been actively involved in multiple Smart City and Smart Utility projects around the globe.

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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