Dell Technologies, Vehant Technologies, and Graymatics and Wordsensing have decided to collaborate to develop and deliver smart city solutions in the areas of ‘Intelligent Traffic Management’ and ‘Safe City’ in India.
Dell Technologies, the tech infrastructure behemoth, has previously implemented a great deal of smart city projects worldwide and plans to bring its expertise to India with its very own customized solutions to suit the region.
“There are five use cases for smart cities that we are very excited about which are global use cases. These include Safe City & Intelligent Traffic Management, Autonomous Car & Intelligent Mobility, Green Energy & Sustainability/Waste Management, Government on an app, Public Health & Education. Of these, the two use cases that are making the biggest take off in our global portfolio are Safe City & Intelligent Traffic Management. In India too, we saw that all smart cities have these two major components in it along with a video wall and operations center to manage safety and traffic, whether it is Ahmedabad, Agartala or Faridabad,” said Dell technologies’ EVP of Global Digital Cities in Asia-Pacific & Japan, Amit Midha.
Midha also spoke about a project I Bengaluru where one of its partners create a one bullet camera which enabled them to detect build speed, identify vehicle number plates and facial recognition.
He said that the number of accidents on a specific road in Bengaluru dropped by 5 per cent per quarter for the last four quarters. He believes that this was due to the change in peoples’ behavior because “people change when they know that wrong behavior will not be tolerated”.
Dell has been working with several partners to develop smart city solutions, its top three partners in India being Vehant, Graymatics and Wordsensing.
Vehant, the Under Vehicle Scanning Systems manufacturer provides smart city solutions that correspond with surveillance, monitoring and security while Graymatic provides cognitive media processing solutions which enavle video analysis and image-recognition. Wordsensing, the IoT pioneer, is known for its tools which enable real-time intelligence for efficient decision making.
“Our approach is very different,” said Midha. “We tell customers, don’t try to take an approach of ripping and replacing and making everything digital overnight. Start with one use case that will deliver results and we will give you the technology to start small and go as big as you want to. However, if customers start big by going to a consulting company, which takes two years to produce a report, it is a waste of time.”
Midha believes that “some cities in India have fallen behind in physical infrastructure and need to catch up. Smart cities is not just about digital infrastructure, physical infrastructure should match with it as well.”
India’s economy is one of the largest developing economies in the world at the moment and its progressive digital initiatives have promoted digital enablement among other things, which makes it a great market for smart city development opportunities.