Cisco has tied up with ILFS Technologies (ITL) at the Cisco India Summit 2014 held at Bangalore, to jointly develop solutions for digital infrastructure and smart cities in the country, reports the Financial Express.
The collaboration will focus on creating traffic management, public safety and e-governance solutions for urban cities, which will help citizens get info about traffic, parking, lighting and water etc. The partnership will combine Cisco’s Internet of Things solutions with ITL’s expertise in infrastructure development in India, to create unique IoT solutions.
ITL is currently developing two global and five national land management projects and had previously rolled out the communication infrastructure for Gurgaon Rapid Metro.
Cisco Smart City: In July this year, Cisco had signed a strategic agreement with Electronics City Industries Association (ELCIA) to set up an Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Hub in Bangalore, as a part of its Cisco Smart+Connected Communities initiative. The company had claimed it would provide the network infrastructure and expertise for testing and production of electronic product prototypes for an “IoT-enabled smart city environment”.
The company had then inaugurated a 2.6 million square foot Smart City in Bangalore as a campus-as-a-city for its employees, and to showcase pervasive network infrastructure, which easily connects devices like mobiles, sensors and information access points with a high level of security, in September this year. As a part of this initiative, the company had demonstrated how cities would evolve with context to education, healthcare, buildings, transport and parking and change the way communities are designed, with economic, environmental and social sustainability in mind.
Cisco IoT initiatives: The company has been ramping up its IoT plans this year with various initiatives and partnerships. Other than smart city solutions, it had also tied up with the engineering services arm of Larsen & Toubro, L&T Technology Services to set up an Internet of Everything (IoE) solutions centre in Bangalore, targeting the transport and mass transit industries. The companies also claimed that solutions for connected stations and connected railway infrastructure, smart video surveillance systems, etc., will also be focus areas.
Cisco Investments, the venture capital arm of Cisco, had also increased the amount allocated for investment in early stage firms in the IoT segment in India by $40 million, in June this year. This $40 million capital is a part of Cisco’s $250 million global “thematic investment” fund that was announced in February this year. Cisco had initially allocated a capital of $100 million to invest in early stage companies in the Internet of Things (IoT) segment, then a few months later, it allocated an additional $150 million over the next two to three years. Recently, the company also invested $2 million in Hyderabad-based Ineda Systems, that makes low-power chips for wearable devices and Internet of Things (IoT) segment.
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