An efficient services delivery platform is essential to utilise information and communications technology (ICT) effectively for building any Smart+Connected Community, according to a latest research paper by Cisco.
A scalable and flexible services-based ecosystem will help enable city administrators to harness the power of ICT to generate sustainable urbanisation, economic growth and environment sustainability.
Sponsored by Cisco, the IDC research paper details how the 21st-century smart cities need to be sustainable socially, economically and environmentally, as governments across nations are investing in collaborative technology relationships, in a bid to make the cities smarter.
Early adoption and integration of ICT in the city master plan is important, while planning, implementing and managing ICT across cities is imperative to build technologically advanced smart cities in the world.
The service delivery platform will play a strategic role in deploying smart services that will enable citizens of the future to live in greener, smarter, more secure and sustainable communities.
The adoption of hardware, software and services in this new light gives way to the creation of a new ICT ecosystem, which IDC refers to as ‘Intelligent X’.
IDC notes that in most potential implementations, the local telecom service providers (SPs) will play an integral role in providing the bandwidth and operational know-how needed to run a smooth, reliable and secure Intelligent X ecosystem of services.
The challenge for SPs will be in integrating their legacy OSS/BSS and network management systems to the future scalable needs of Intelligent X communities.
Routers, switches, storage and authentication, caching and firewall servers will be required to manage the large amount of information that will flow through the Intelligent X ecosystem.
The report reveals that cloud computing provided through fault-tolerant cloud datacentres is the general direction that most of these implementations will follow.
The datacentre will have to deliver new video and Web 2.0 applications, to meet the service provider’s operational requirements while the service provider’s datacentre also needs to leverage the advances that ICT is making in the datacentre today.
It includes infrastructure components such as the latest server platforms, the use of virtualisation, and best practices in datacentre design.
