Role Of IoT In Smart Cities

IoT Platform for Sustainable Smart Cities:

Smart cities are a concoction of people, governance, technology and environment. Internet of Things or IoT plays a major role in cementing the distinct blocks of smart cities. Monitoring assets and managing resources, collecting data and pushing it to right target audience, analyzing huge volumes of data for enhanced management and essentially connecting people, and things for an enhanced lifestyle are what an IoT platform intends to do.

WebNMS – The IoT and Telecom Network Management division of Zoho Corporation is one of the leading providers of open IoT platform. The platform is engineered to cater key enterprise concerns such as Energy management, Remote asset monitoring and Mobile asset tracking. These key capabilities tied into a single, unified platform creates a strong foundation for building various bespoke applications like energy metering, utilities management, traffic and public transport management, waste management and building management, power distribution and resource management etc. These smart applications aim at saving time, minimizing costs, reducing failures and downtime along with effective utilization of resources and improved life of city patrons. The platform acts as a bridge between application developers and sensor and gateway manufacturers. Moreover, unlike siloed solutions, the WebNMS IoT platform is open to multiple protocols and devices. The solutions can be scaled to 100s of 1000s of devices. The major advantage of WebNMS IoT platform is the ability to customize it according to unique requirements.

Importance of IoT platform

There are several players in the IoT ecosystem, each possessing expertise in their core competency. It is unlikely for any player to invest time and money in all the layers of IoT anatomy (sensors, software platform and applications). Even if they do, it may end up in more of a ‘Jack of all trades’ scenario. Consider the Android platform; it acts as a gelling factor for device manufacturers and application developers. Similarly, it is the IoT platform that serves as the binding agent between hardware components such as sensors, gateways and the software applications. The IoT market, currently is vague with each layer battling for their share of the ‘smart city’ pie without vividness of their role in its development. Instead of trying to fit too many hands into a single glove, companies should start concentrating on what best fits their areas of expertise. Sensor and gateways vendors should focus on enhancing their device capabilities while application developers should work on delivering solutions within optimum cost and time. IoT Platform being the foundation that holds various other layers in place, platform vendors should particularly strive to make solid framework that seamlessly tie all the other layers to give the end user a hassle-free experience. The platform should be vendor neutral and customizable.

Besides enabling communication between devices and humans, the platform should enable large data collection and analysis for informed decision making. It should serve as a sturdy foundation that could scale to future devices and capabilities.

Key takeaways:

• Importance of open, saleable IoT Platform for a connected and sustainable city, with efficient flow of data and informed decision making

• Importance of customizable platform of real – time application developers and gateway and sensor manufacturers.

• Importance of a harmonious IoT ecosystem where gateway and sensor manufacturers, software developers and platform vendors co – exist to create niche IoT applications

Video contents:

• The Need for IoTPlatform

• Roadblocks in IoTApplication Development

• Open Platform Advantage

• WebNMS IoT Platform

• Breaking Down The Silos

• Developing An Effective IoT Strategy

• The WebNMS Advantage

Presented by: Prabhu Ramachandran, Director, WebNMS

05_Role of IoT in Smart Cities from EFY on Vimeo.