Open and interoperable smart cities: Closing the gap

As urbanisation intensifies, cities are looking to solve a complex and evolving long-tail of challenges with technology, from cutting traffic congestion and ensuring citizen safety to reducing energy consumption and environmental footprint.

While the Internet of Things offers cities huge potential to benefit from a wealth of data, deployment continues to be slow, costly and complex. Eighty two per cent of smart city pilots fail due to a lack of maturity.

The obstacles to deployment have meant some cities prefer to avoid investing in connected infrastructure altogether, fearing poor return on investment due to being locked into proprietary systems or having to pay for expensive integration.