HPE Launches Customer Experience Center to Accelerate the Development of Smart Cities in India

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) India announced the launch of a Customer Experience Center (CEC) in Gurugram to showcase and demonstrate IoT-based smart city solutions. The facility will feature a wide-range of innovative offerings for smart city projects from HPE, and powered by Intel architecture.

By launching this CEC, HPE will enable partners and customers to experience cutting-edge technologies first hand that can help in the seamless development of smart city projects across the country.

“The vision of the government’s smart cities’ mission is to improve the quality of life of every citizen in the country. A smart city strategy requires careful and proper implementation of new technologies and a citizen-centric approach,” said Som Satsangi, MD – India, HPE. “We are therefore happy to launch this Intel-powered CEC in Gurugram to showcase our experience, best practices, partner ecosystem and technology innovation. Through this initiative we aim to help governments leverage technology to reduce the time it takes to turn smart ideas into smart cities.”

“At Intel, our vision is to work with the industry to connect devices to sensors, and enable storage and analysis of this data for actionable insights. The Intel powered smart city CEC at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, India, is a great opportunity for customers to experience, and for system integrators to showcase local IoT implementation possibilities for industries such as healthcare, smart cities, and waste management. Our end goal is to automate and bring all possible IoT devices online, for maximized efficiency, improved security, and enhanced business performance,” said Prakash Mallya, MD, Sales & Marketing Group, Intel India.

As the process of establishing 100 smart cities gathers momentum across India, HPE along with Intel and other smart solution providers, will offer governments and city administrations an excellent opportunity to accelerate time to value and deliver new, innovative, and interactive services to the citizens through IoT. The CEC will demonstrate IoT-based smart city solutions that address the complex and fragmented ecosystem that exists within IoT environments and HPE can help implement an infrastructure that interconnects the various components of the end-to-end solution.

Some of the key smart city solutions that will be showcased and demonstrated at the CEC are:

• eHealth Center (eHC) – The eHCs addresses the need for affordable healthcare in emerging cities by enabling improved access and effectiveness of primary healthcare in underserved areas. These are built on a framework that leverage cutting-edge technologies including cloud, mobility, big data and also feature dashboards for real time data representation and analysis. Since 2012, more than 80 eHCs have been set-up across the country, and have collectively witnessed over 5 lakh patient visits.
• Public Wi-Fi – Today the public Wi-Fi network needs to be more than just a “free hotspot”. It should be capable of delivering value-added services such as analytics, location based advertising and services, and mobile engagement to enable monetization of the infrastructure. HPE Aruba’s Wi-Fi solutions, based on a foundation of security, scalability and RF performance, drive additional value-added services including unified communications, mobile engagement and location based advertisements to enable further monetization of Wi-Fi deployments.
• City Surveillance – With the need for technology enabled safe cities becoming ever more imperative, HPE along with partners offer end-to-end surveillance solution capability to deliver video analytics required for city surveillance. HPE’s Edgeline IoT and analytics systems makes it possible to efficiently analyze and process data at the point of data creation/ingestion. This enables law enforcements to identify and respond in case of a potential untoward incident in real-time.
• Solid Waste Management – Solid waste management is a complex activity for any city administration as it involves ensuring optimized utilization of manpower and equipment. Resonating with the government’s initiative of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, HPE offers solid waste management solutions capable of managing and monitoring the sanitation workers and equipment such as mapping the route for the garbage trucks and tracking them.
• Integrated Command and Control Center (ICCC) – The ICCC is based on the HPE Universal IoT Platform, which is common across all HPE smart solutions and provides agnostic support for smart ecosystems along with strategic partners. The ICCC enables governments or city administrations to remotely manage and control various IoT services via a single platform. These services include:
  • Smart water – Protects the city’s water supply and prevent water waste by detecting water pressure, temperatures, and leaks
  • Smart lighting – Saves time and costs by identifying broken lighting equipment without the need for maintenance crews to physical inspect them
  • Smart traffic and transport – Improves traffic flow using intelligent traffic signals and keep commuters informed on the status of public transport in near-real time by using digital signage
  • Smart parking – Saves energy by turning lights on in a parking lot only when required and provide real-time parking availability information
  • Smart building – Improves building electricity usage with motion sensor lights; alerts when there is a leaking pipe using smart meters; monitors energy use of an electric meter and alert when it reaches a specific threshold
  • Smart industry – Enables easier tracking of transport and logistics flows across industries
  • Smart farm – Improves water utilization and irrigation by leveraging weather forecast and farm data

Recently, the Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation Ltd. selected the HPE Universal IoT Platform to create India’s first cloud-based ICCC, which with its multitenancy capabilities will be able to run several city command center operations in parallel across seven cities in Madhya Pradesh.

The Intel based ecosystem innovations enable smart cities to benefit from IoT, and helps to ensure the solutions are manageable, secure, scalable, interoperable and sustainable. The Intel IoT Platform is a family of Intel products that seamlessly and securely connect and manage devices, deliver trusted data to the cloud, and deliver value through analytics.