Announcing Cisco Kinetic for Cities: New name, alignment and evolution for Smart+Connected Digital Platform

As more cities and communities undertake digital transformation, Cisco continues to lead with powerful research, vision, technology, and business models all designed to guide our customers’ journey. We continue to evolve our offerings—drawing on internal and partner resources and customer feedback—to lay a path forward and keep it clear, safe, and well lit.

In fact, Cisco was recognized as the #1 Smart City Supplier in the recent report, Navigant Research Leaderboard: Smart City Suppliers, produced by leading smart cities analyst firm Navigant Research. We’re thrilled to receive this recognition!

“Cisco’s position as the leader in the smart cities market is based on its integrated perspective on urban innovation, strong sector-specific solutions, and a commitment to continued thought leadership and city engagement,” noted Eric Woods, research director at Navigant Research. “With the development of its connected digital platform and a range of vertical solution offerings, Cisco is providing an integrated environment for cities moving to IoT-based solutions and at the same time putting its smart city program onto a stronger commercial basis.”

One of the most exciting changes in how Cisco supports smart cities and communities going forward is that our connected digital platform and solutions strategy is now fully aligned with Cisco Kinetic, a new Cisco unified Internet of Things (IoT) platform strategy. As such, the “Smart+Connected Digital Platform” is being renamed “Cisco Kinetic for Cities” and integrated—along with the solutions for lighting, parking, crowd, environment and others—into the overall Cisco Kinetic platform strategy.

Jahangir Mohammed, VP/GM of IoT, explains: “Cisco Kinetic is a cloud-based platform that helps customers extract, compute, and move data from connected things to IoT applications to deliver better outcomes and services. Cisco Kinetic gets the right data to the right applications at the right time—across edge, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid environments—while executing policies to enforce data ownership, privacy, security and even data sovereignty laws. These are all critical requirements for any smart city and community deployment.”

“Cisco Kinetic represents an important milestone for Cisco and our customers who are eager to unlock the value of the data being generated by connected machines, things and spaces,” says Jahangir. “Cisco Kinetic for Cities is purpose-built to harness the power of all that data to drive smart city initiatives forward. We’re excited to align our efforts in the development of these IoT technologies that bring simplicity, scalability, and interoperability to organizations across all sectors.”

By integrating with Cisco Kinetic, we can leverage more resources, expertise, and visionary thought leadership across Cisco and a broader partner ecosystem to provide our customers with even better tools and services to help them manage, share, and leverage data and gain new insights.

Cisco Kinetic for Cities will continue to provide a horizontal, data aggregation platform—one tailored specifically to the needs and challenges of cities and communities. It will continue to enable a plethora of solutions and applications from Cisco, our partners and third-party developers through a growing set of application programming interfaces (APIs). The architecture and the approach to deployment for the platform and solutions will be built on the successes (and lessons learned) from current deployments of connected digital platform and solutions—from Copenhagen to Hamburg, from Jaipur to Adelaide, from Kansas City to Las Vegas, and many more—where the benefits of digitization and a platform approach are continuing to accrue.

The municipality of Albertslund, a Copenhagen suburb, participates in the smart city initiatives that Cisco is driving to help Greater Copenhagen achieve its social, economic and environmental goals.

Says Niels Carsten Bluhme—Albertslund’s senior director for city, culture, environment and employment—in a video chronicling the vision and progress of these initiatives, “[By] using sensors, digital management platforms, and analytics programs, we can achieve a number of benefits on the green transformation agenda in becoming carbon neutral. Today, we regard this as the most important accelerator for getting there.”

We are committed to continuing our strong leadership, development, and partnership objectives in the smart cities space. We’ll be making some more exciting announcements at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona (Nov. 14 – 16, 2017). Perhaps we will see you there!

Stay tuned…

Anil