IoT Minute: The $1.5 Trillion Smart City Opportunity

80 percent of the population in developed countries will live in cities by 2050, according to the Population Reference Bureau. This creates an opportunity for solution providers to improve quality of life through IT-based technologies. This concept is referred to as a smart city.

Business consulting firm Frost and Sullivan expects smart cities to become a $1.5-trillion market in 2019. Solution providers have multiple go-to-market routes on how they want to tap into the smart city movement, including infrastructure development and technology integration, along with energy and security services.

Bob Patterson, chief strategist and senior enterprise architect at HPE, says partners, “need to be in the upfront discussion to understand what things are trying to be connected? What are the data sources? Once we understand that, we can build a solution that includes all of the hardware components and different things we really make money from.”

Technology vendors need help from partners who can provide specialized services for their technologies to reach their potential. Patterson says, “Making sure that our partners understand our capabilities, can sell those and making sure that we can interoperate with their capabilities is absolutely crucial. Without our partners, we’ll fail.”

HPE has teamed with Arrow Electronics to develop smart city solutions that partners can leverage to operate more efficiently, enhance the customer experience and add revenue streams to their business. Patterson says, “We’ve already got strong capabilities in the smart city space. By partnering with Arrow and HPE, [partners] have a full set of end-to-end solutions they can utilize and sell.”

Arrow also provides its partners and their customers with authorized HPE Partner Ready Certification Training. This includes specialized courses in designing, deploying and managing HPE technology products. That way, solution providers can deliver services based on each smart city’s unique issues.

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