Oracle India recently signed an MoU with the Maharashtra government to help its smart city project. Niraj Prakash, Director, Solution Consulting, Oracle India, spoke to BusinessLine , highlighting features of their solution — ‘smart city in a box’ — and how it will make things simpler for both city authorities and the public.
The ‘smart city in a box’ is an integrated platform, you say. Can you illustrate this with an example? Say, what all it would do in a smart city programme?
The ‘smart city in a box’ allows you to run all the smart city applications, for example, smart transportation, smart parking, smart waste and water management and the necessary digital technology services, for example, IoT, mobile services, cloud services, Big Data and analytics which allows convergence across multiple solutions for a smart city.
Of course, it also has the potential to provide convergence for several smart cities across the State as well, if required. Besides, the entire aspect of revenue management in a typical PPP implementation of smart cities can be managed through this box allowing for metering, charge-back, billing etc. The revenue applications, which run on the ‘smart city in a box’, would also allow the city to augment its revenue from various sources like parks, hoardings and other assets, which otherwise are difficult to track and use.
The smart box makes implementation of the pillars of Digital India easy for officials, for citizens, how will it make a difference?
Citizens would be able to benefit from all the services that will run on the smart city box. For example, they can use the various city apps on their mobile that will be connected with applications on the smart city box. For example, they can place service requests for garbage pick-up, access parking spaces and rates with geospatial maps, reserve city tours or banquet halls, use panic or police assistance buttons and several more.
The solution platform will generate lot of data. What kind of interpretations or usage, it can be put up to?
One of the key value propositions of the smart box is its ability to handle different kinds of data – structured, unstructured or streams. Not only does the technology-on-the-box allow collection and ingestion of this data but also it has the capability to cleanse, prepare, organise and analyse data in various perspectives.
For example, assisting citizens in emergency in real time based on safety requests or service requests that come in from various sources. Or, for example, make decisions and plans for augmenting transportation services, managing utility maintenance or adding parking spaces etc. Additionally, the data coming in real time allows city officials to plan, schedule and monitor all the city services in real time through a centralised command and control centre.
What is the amount of investment that will be required from the government for this solution?
The investment on this box will depend on the specific solutions that will be used by the city under their specific smart city programme. It would, therefore, vary from city to city.
The important thing here is to have flexibility of choices of services to deploy and run on this box based on funding available and project timelines for different services. This is where the box provides complete choice and scale for whatever minimum or maximum services that the city wants to run. There is a choice for temporal scaling up as well based on how the city and services grow.
Very importantly, the ‘smart city in a box’ takes away the capex and replaces it with operating expenses by allowing cities to pay for it based on “pay as per use” mechanism. This makes it much easier for the cities to deploy the solution and is also in line with the desired PPP models in which the smart cities are to be built and run.