SMARTCITY Expo World Congress 2019: With a Growing focus on Platforms, True Smart Cities Are Data Driven and Support an Open Ecosystem

​Expectations for this year’s Smart City Expo World Congress 2019 (SCEWC) in Barcelona are at a high point. Since the first congress in 2011, there has been a major ramp up in momentum worldwide in Smart City initiatives. But is the digital smart city concept all hype, and will the event feature re-packaged products, or will we witness some new innovation and concrete progress?
 
We expect to see initiatives from across the spectrum of larger and smaller vendors presenting their go-to-market for ‘Smartcities as a platform’, where value propositions include ICT infrastructure elements such as IoT, 5G, AI/ML, Big data and Edge computing. These all fit into an increasingly open and cloud-intelligent focused world. Also, other stakeholders such as service providers (CSP, MNO, IT sourcing), system integrator and individual HW/SW start-up players are chasing this market space.
 
Some key expectations to look out for demonstrating smart city momentum are;

• Real use cases and customer references demonstrating ROI or KPIs from different continents, including both future-focused greenfield and existing smart city deployments.
• Industry standards and interoperability in order to facilitate a fruitful smart city (and/or regional) platform where a rich number of stakeholders can partner and participate without painful implementations.
• Besides the technology platform provided, solutions, features, and service set up and management must be easy to handle for customers.
• Although smart city ICT infrastructure elements are in different stages of maturing, among different suppliers the broad themes of automation, IoT, and security will continue to dominate the landscape in the foreseeable future. AI and ML will play a key role in these areas as telcos progress on the path of service agility and digital transformation, while lowering their capex and opex.

Players in this segment need to adopt a rapid-learning philosophy to keep up in a high paced technology world where 5G will take center stage in 2020 for smart city initiatives. 
 
SCEWC 2019, 19-21 November URL:  http://www.smartcityexpo.com/en/home
 
Clavem Research is expanding its IoT & Smart Cities coverage in the client subscription area of this site. A research agenda for publishing in-depth advisory and market insight reports will closely examine the general market trends as well as individual player initiatives.
Rolf Schonhowd, VP Research and Co-Founder will be present at the SMARTCITY Expo World Congress 2019, please do not hesitate to contact us to arrange a meeting.