Bordeaux-Métropole (Greater Bordeaux) set its ambitions high: It aims to be a state-of-the-art smart city and community with citizens at the centre of its digital transformation strategy. Bordeaux has been…
“But when investigating how IoT applications could support other city operations, Bordeaux found that the technologies required would often rely on different connectivity and data models.
It became clear that deploying IoT in silos (e.g. lighting, mobility, waste management) would limit the ability to scale smart city solutions. It also became clear that IoT platforms based on open standards are best capable of supporting a diverse range of IoT applications, the sharing of associated data (subject to proper permissions) and avoid lock-in to technology providers.”
Then Bordeaux decided to develop their own IoT platform based on available open building blocks. This is a very common next step in the evolution of smart cities. But, not necessarily the last. There comes a time where maintenance becomes a challenge. People leave, code gets old, and it is difficult and extremely costly to keep the pace with the tech development.
The same reason why very few develops their own HR or CRM systems today. Why develop it inhouse when you can buy a much better product and at a considerably lower cost?
A better strategy is to buy that IoT capability as-a-service, from a specialized supplier that drives tech development in regards to interoperability, data quality, security, etc. Sensatives Yggio is a leading interoperability platform, based on open-source FIWARE, integrating everything, exposing all data, events, and functionality through a common standardized API. And we provide it as-a-service so that we guarantee that we always support the latest IoT technologies.
As a city, you should focus on what to do with the information, and not on data acquisition.
