Beth Howen
Head of Public Sector & Defense, Atos
For cities and local authorities, the urgent need to meet key sustainability goals and deliver smart services demands more unified thinking and integrated delivery. To inform decision-making on aspects such as mobility, public safety and waste management, smart cities must employ vast lakes of data from growing numbers of applications, sensors and edge devices via the Internet of Things (IoT).
In the past decade, Atos has worked to create the best platform for smart cities, based on open source and open standards, to support city initiatives on a global scale. Where most cities started with a “vertical” approach, focusing on a single topic such as lighting or parking, we focused on the “horizontal” layer, to maximize the benefits of combining data from many different sources. Today, we see our efforts pay-off: instead of just smart cities, we can now apply this approach to the campus, grid, airport, seaport, territory or agriculture. The power of data can be released using a single platform, creating a new data economy.
The Urban Data Platform is Atos’s open, interoperable and standard solution for smart services, applicable in any vertical domain (including smart cities, smart agriculture, smart campus and smart infrastructure). It enables the collection and integration of information from sensors and other data sources, normalizing that data and processing it to provide aggregated and intelligent views of raw data to support decision making. The platform uses open source software and open standards for maximum interoperability, and provides a set of functional blocks to build smart solutions from context information, making it modular and flexible to deploy.
Delivering digital transformation and building a new data economy is where the strength of Atos is most evident. From cybersecurity to high performance computing, from edge computing to secure networking, our full portfolio of services and products supports it all.
This paper brings together ideas and experience from experts across Atos and some of our partners — to help authorities address their challenges through collaboration on new data solutions.
