Over the last ten years, CISCO has been a pioneer in the smart city industry, but their latest move in December brings the customer-first approach into question. This is one of the main reasons why the company has decided to pivot from their Kinetic for Cities software services. Although the pandemic has put a strain on CISCO’s core business of hardware technology, coupling that with limited resources from cities during the pandemic has made it a little harder to make cities smarter. Governments and cities have been very limited with their budgets, trying to facilitate infrastructure change while keeping the pandemic at bay. The unfortunate timing of the pandemic has made CISCO’s Kinetic for Cities software a little out of reach for many cities look for smarter solutions.
Vikas Butaney, Vice President and General Manager of CISCO IoT, was quoted saying how extensive data streamlining was more relevant before, as the markets are now more closely focused on specialized use cases. “like smart intersections, parking and roadways.” This pivot has allowed CISCO to focus on its core businesses like their government clients, providing them with administration, public safety, and other needs.
The idea that a city could be ‘smart’ in just a few steps is daunting. The truth is that incorporating a plethora of features all at once can be highly challenging. Therefore, cities are looking to invest in digital infrastructure so that they can continue to grow and meet new needs as they emerge. Smartpolis has been around for just this reason; we understand the need for cities and governments but also our end users: the citizens. Smartpolis creates an affordable and scalable suite of technologies that are implemented quickly, efficiently, and with all the help of the Smartpolis team – first, focusing on the city administration side, and then with the citizen side of usage. Not only that, we work with cities daily to provide them with comprehensive and buildable solutions that can be tailored to their needs. Services that affect the daily citizen, like alerting through smartphone apps, reporting & requests, infrastructure & IoT network monitoring/maintenance, and other smart technologies are critical to serving the city admin and end-users are handled with precision and detail.
Working with several cities has allowed us to pivot and add to our business model, ensuring that we deliver a system that works in congruence with governments, cities, and people at the core. While CISCO, unfortunately, does not have plans to introduce a replacement dashboard product for smart cities, this has allowed some new market players to enter the industry, such as Smartpolis.
Our platform and software suite provides a common level of municipal technology standardization to all members. It brings cities together regardless of location, size, and available resources to collectively address technical challenges. To help cities push forward with their smart city initiatives and goals, we offer a risk-free 3-month trial. In addition, we want to make the Smartpolis integration as smooth as possible and understand those budget constraints can sometimes get in the way of adopting new systems or software. This is why we have made it easier than ever for cities and municipalities to try out the Smartpolis platform – risk-free.
