Teradata teams with Cisco to unlock IoT value for Smart Cities

Teradata is working with Cisco on a digital transformation solution with a focus on smart cities and communities. As per the company, combining the merits of Cisco’s IoT platform, Cisco Kinetic for Cities, with the Teradata Analytics Platform, the solution will help cities become smarter and more connected by providing a powerful solution for integrated data exchange.

The Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform excels at collecting, aggregating and normalizing real-time data securely across city networks. Teradata will integrate with this platform to provide smart data management, such as analytics, persistent data lifecycle management and data enrichment that delivers business insights to cities and communities. Together, the two leaders in their respective fields provide powerful tools that cities need to improve efficiency, enhance public safety, deliver better citizen services and create new revenue streams.

Data collection and management within a city is often decentralized and stored in departmental silos, where each city manager creates a “cockpit” of data and a set of tools for managing specific city facilities. This approach makes it difficult, if not impossible, to generate a city-wide view of the data. Disparate data silos must be integrated to reveal insights about the city as a whole. Only then can the data be used effectively to drive predictive and prescriptive decision-making for a variety of urban services, including lighting, parking, traffic and waste management, citizen engagement, safety and security.

“Far too many cities do not fully recognize the value of their data,” said Anil Menon, Global President for Smart+Connected Communities - Cisco. “With the Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform, we aim to help cities think holistically about their city infrastructure investments and the value of the data captured by their connected assets, such as traffic cameras, parking meters and environmental sensors. Once data is aggregated, customers using Teradata’s analytics can leverage the resulting contextualized information to guide planning, monetization and broader economic development efforts that keep cities liveable, sustainable and resilient.”

Using Cisco Kinetic for Cities, cities can gather, aggregate and normalize information from disparate and siloed city applications, including but not limited to traffic, lighting and parking. Combining this real-time sensor data with other city information, such as data from payment systems, citizen sentiment and analytic applications, Teradata is able to deliver prescriptive and predictive analytics, as well as easy-to-comprehend visualizations, that help city leaders make smarter, more informed decisions. Such a combined solution could, for example, automatically detect security incidents and generate alerts, locate traffic bottlenecks and optimize signals to ease congestion or evaluate route options to shorten emergency vehicle response time.