It's time we made our cities ready for the future. While we have made our daily lives technologically equipped, with a tech or an app ready to make our lives easier and more smoother, but in the process we have largely looked over the places that we stay in, our cities. Seeing the potential that smart city technologies holds in India, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and PwC have decided to join their hands on a new project that will work towards creating a center of excellence (CoE) in the city of Kolkata.

The CoE will work towards using the vast possibilities that Internet of Things (IoT) technologies has to offer and optimise things for the city administrators so that they can offer their best services to the citizens of their cities.

“The burgeoning impact of IoT is going beyond the enterprise and now has large societal implications. Bringing together our industry consulting and technology teams with HPE, we are working on solutions which will bring significant productivity gains to the organizations and societies at large,” said Raman Kalra, partner at PwC India in a statement.

The new project will see UK headquartered professional services network, PwC leveraging American multinational enterprise information technology company, HPE's famous Universal IoT (UIoT) platform in the CoE for various purposes like supporting development, testing and managing initiatives centred around future cities.

As per the agreement, the CoE at Kolkata will be making use of UIoT platform's features such as increased LoRa support, lightweight machine to machine (M2M) support and expanded device management. Together, the two global giants will work towards enabling IoT applications that can provide advanced analytics and machine learning innovations.

The project will also see PwC’s applications and dashboard being integrated with HPE's UIoT platform so as to drive speed, security and scale for the new CoE at works in Kolkata. The centre will initially be working on a number of use cases including some of the most important ones that affect cities like waste management, environment and transportation systems. Eventually, the use cases will be expanded to to other industry verticals including infrastructure and manufacturing.

Commenting on his firm's association with PwC on the project, Nigel Upton, general manager, Universal IoT platform at HPE said, “By combining HPE technology solutions and services with PwC business strategy, process, people and change capabilities, we are able to help organizations accelerate business and societal transformations, and derive greater value faster fromtheir IoT initiatives and the center of excellence in Kolkata is a testament of our joint efforts."

According to HPE and PwC, smart poles will be deployed throughout the city so as to serve as efficient aggregation points for cameras, sensors and digital display boards collecting environmental data. The data collected by the aforementioned devices will then be put to use for identifying areas that have to face heavy pollution on a daily basis.

In addition to this, IoT devices will also be used to collect traffic data and model traffic condition so that the authorities can modify the timing cycle of traffic signals accordingly for a smoother flow of vehicles. The traffic data can also be integrated with GPS data from the transit management system to provide accurate estimated times of arrival for public buses, which will not only save time of the people but also result in less traffic on roads. The plans also include placing sensors in parking lots so as to enable citizens with real-time tracking of available parking spots.

This development was first reported in Communications Today.
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