What Happens in Vegas…Will Extend Well Beyond!

Las Vegas is one of the world’s most unusual cities, not only for its unique mix of businesses, visitors and communities, but also for its visionary leadership. Las Vegas is avidly adopting smart technologies that its mayor and her technical advisors are confident will boost the city’s reputation for going big to a whole new level. It is also another exceptional proving ground for Cisco and its newly updated Smart+Connected Digital Platform to demonstrate the power of data when harnessed and shared.

“Las Vegas is becoming known for its efforts to provide safe, reliable and efficient civic technology. We plan to deploy solutions that will enhance mobility, reduce congestion, improve resident safety, reduce our carbon footprint and stimulate economic growth and diversity.  It only makes sense for Las Vegas to emerge as a Smart City and we are excited to join forces with Cisco to make this happen,” said Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn G. Goodman.

Cisco is already seeing great success with the Smart+Connected Digital Platform, now operating in communities across the globe since we officially announced the platform back in November of 2016, with many more poised to follow suit soon. So, we’re delighted not only to have a presence here in Las Vegas at Cisco Live US, where we’re now announcing the update to the platform, but also to reinforce our strong relationship with and support for the City of Las Vegas as it takes its next steps forward in becoming a smart city.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0ry02Toiag

That journey involves implementing new technologies and processes that will drive efficiencies, improve safety, and create richer citizen experiences—starting with the network of the future coupled with the platform approach. A new Cisco research report estimates the value at stake for cities, such as new opportunities and cost savings, at approximately $2.3 trillion globally by 2024. And, we feel strongly that the Smart+Connected Digital Platform will help to move cities in the right direction to realizing that value—particularly in view of the new additions that this important update includes.

The Smart+Connected Digital Platform will, of course, continue to provide a powerful way to aggregate and organize data—coming from city infrastructure sensors, mobile devices, cameras and other data sources—in a consistent format. And it will still make it easy for both agency- and public-facing applications to tap into that data, in a compliant and secure fashion, to give cities an edge in making better, more informed decisions in real-time. But now, with the new release, comes a variety of platform enhancements and new capabilities, including:

Pre-packaged solution bundles that combine secure Cisco networking technologies and services with expert third-party products and services, including on-going managed service offerings

Easier configuration and operation with pre-packaged, commercial off-the-shelf platform options and expanded sharing capabilities

End-to-end embedded data and device security

Enhanced dashboard capabilities complete with video

Automated updates to city-business-process policy changes and flexible reporting

Option to integrate Cisco Spark for immediate response and collabortation city stakeholders for issue mitigation

A self-service device and application integration feature for vendors to ease entry into the partner ecosystem

Improvements to existing solutions for transit (buses and fleets), parking, traffic, lighting, and crowd management, environment and added support for additional use cases including safety and security and waste management

“These changes will go far in strengthening our entire solution portfolio, expanding our ecosystem, improving our time to market and facilitating adoption of this powerful data management framework,” adds Bryan Tantzen, senior director of the Industries Product Group & Manufacturing Business Unit at Cisco. “For instance, the platform now includes Cisco Spark, so a flagging system device or condition can actually trigger Spark to pop up a virtual meeting room and invite the key stakeholders into the space to immediately collaborate on addressing the issue at hand. This should be a real game changer in the way city operations are managed.”

Not all cities are alike, as we know. So, the new enhancements and capabilities not only help to build a better experience to drive results, but also simplify the process and provide more options for meeting a city’s specific needs. In fact, we’ve just established a new initiative with one of our valued distribution partners, Tech Data. We will be working together to simplify and tailor the options for how the Smart+Connected Digital Platform can be deployed by the channel for the growing list of communities, like Las Vegas, are ready to move forward on their digital transformation journey.

Every smart city begins with its network. Cisco Smart+Connected Communities solutions work from the network infrastructure up, giving our customers three decades of rock-solid networking expertise and a decade of focused research with city leaders worldwide.

If you’ll be at Cisco Live this week in Las Vegas, stop by the IoT and Industry District in the World of Solutions and experience the power of the Smart+Connected Digital Platform for yourself, or sign up for our breakout session, featuring Michael Sherwood, the CIO for the City of Las Vegas. We also invite you to follow us @CiscoGovt for all our #CLUS and #DigitalPlatform coverage.