Enterprise networking vendor Cisco announced its smart city alliance with AGT International.
Cisco and AGT International will collaborate to offer intelligent networking, virtualized computing and video management software from Cisco and smart city software platform, sensor gateway and analytics from AGT.
Smart city projects will benefit from cost-effective and efficient delivery of services that enhance the daily lives of citizens and improve urban services – from transportation and healthcare to utilities infrastructure and disaster preparedness and personal safety.
The Cisco and AGT offering will initially be provided on-premise and will evolve to a cloud-based “Software as a Service” model. These models are customizable and flexible to support a variety of customer needs and budgets. As part of this agreement, AGT has selected Cisco as its cloud provider for its city cloud solutions.
To execute these solutions, AGT and Cisco will integrate Cisco VSM video management technology and support Cisco’s range of cameras with AGT’s city platform, creating scalable integrated solutions supporting hundreds of thousands of sensors in one system.
The alliance has a roadmap of integration between the two companies that will be delivered over time, and the companies will build research and development labs to test integrated solutions to support customers.
“Today, 99 percent of the physical world is not connected to the Internet. However, cities are the epicenter of the Internet of Everything, where people, things, data and processes can be connected to deliver new and amazing value,” said Wim Elfrink , executive vice president, Industry Solutions and Chief Globalisation Officer, Cisco.
Built around AGT’s urban management platform, the solution applies multiple sensing and analytical technologies such as video and acoustic analytics, social media engagement, license plate recognition, facial recognition, mobile crowd sourcing, mobile applications for city civil workers, smart waste and other sources.
AGT’s city fusion platform, powered by Cisco Unified Computing System technology, uses big data analysis to reduce false alerts while increasing incident detection rates. Sharing a common platform, infrastructure and management allows agencies to be more efficient and cost-effective, especially when coping with decreasing budgets.
Cisco says the first solutions will be available mid-2014 and will initially focus on two key areas:
A traffic management solution that will identify, respond to and resolve traffic incidents by providing real-time traffic situational awareness will support incident detection using live video feeds from incident zones, with video analytics, in-pavement wireless magnetic sensors, license plate readers, social media and advanced traffic modeling prediction and alternative strategy formulation.
The system supports video feed sharing across different agencies and provides analytics of incident trends over time.
Future solutions to be developed and launched will address city and country critical infrastructure, such as airports, railway stations and stadiums.
