Cisco will spend more than €20 million in setting up a new innovation centre for smart cities in Barcelona.
The Internet of Everything Innovation Centre, which is scheduled to open in summer 2016, will work on developing new services and solutions including the likes of smart parking, lighting and location-based analytics, in addition to energy management, safety, security and cloud services.
The vendor will also use the centre, which will be part of a wider Smart City campus in middle of Barcelona, to show off its own Smart+Connected Communities solutions, which it said would demonstrate how they can be used to improve the lives of smart city residents.
The centre will be Cisco’s fifth following existing hubs in Brazil and South Korea, with a further two under development in Germany and Canada. The vendor said it will make an investment of more than €20 million between 2015 and 2020, restoring the 19th Century Ca l’Alier building, setting up the lab, hiring engineers and developers and buying IT equipment.
Anil Menon, President, Smart+Connected Communities and Cisco Deputy Chief Globalisation officer, said: “Global IoE innovation centres -like the one just announced for Barcelona- will support customers, partners, start-ups, governments, research bodies and academia. These centres represent powerful hubs capable of galvanising innovative thinking into influential new strategies for defining and building the next iteration of our cities and of our world.
“For instance, as urban services become connected within cities, unprecedented economic opportunities will follow –leading to a new globalised urban services industry. By leveraging Internet-of-Everything approaches, this global marketplace unveils great opportunity for innovation – new ways to share information, to extend learning, to distribute expertise and resources, to accommodate need and address challenges.”
The innovation centre is the latest move by Cisco in the smart cities sector. Last month, it announced it was teaming up with Gowex to build a smart city for the Dubai Airport Freezone Authority. Both companies said they were looking to deploy the likes of smart transport and parking, geo-located advertising, urban safety, traffic management and smart tourism.
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