Teradata today announced it is working with Cisco on a digital transformation solution with a focus on smart cities and communities. The two companies will combine the elements of Cisco’s IoT platform, Cisco Kinetic for Cities, with the Teradata Analytics Platform to provide a powerful solution for integrated data exchange, helping cities become smarter and more connected by .
Data collection and management within a city is often decentralized and stored in departmental silos, where each city manager creates a “cockpit” of data and a set of tools for managing specific city facilities. This approach makes it difficult, if not impossible, to generate a city-wide view of the data. Disparate data silos must be integrated to reveal insights about the city as a whole. Only then can the data be used effectively to drive predictive and prescriptive decision-making for a variety of urban services, including lighting, parking, traffic and waste management, citizen engagement, safety and security.

“Data is the foundation of value creation in today’s digitally enabled society,” said Stephen Brobst, Chief Technology Officer at Teradata. “Cities are currently undergoing a seismic shift in thinking to recognize that their data has real value that can enable new services and capabilities to better serve their citizens and visitors. Accomplishing this requires that smart cities tap into a comprehensive and robust analytics ecosystem. Cisco and Teradata platforms are cornerstones of such an ecosystem, which can empower city managers to make better, data-driven decisions.”
“Far too many cities do not fully recognize the value of their data,” said Anil Menon, Global President for Smart+Connected Communities at Cisco. “With the Cisco Kinetic for Cities platform, we aim to help cities think holistically about their city infrastructure investments and the value of the data captured by their connected assets, such as traffic cameras, parking meters and environmental sensors. Once data is aggregated, customers using Teradata’s analytics can leverage the resulting contextualized information to guide planning, monetization and broader economic development efforts that keep cities livable, sustainable and resilient.”
Using Cisco Kinetic for Cities, cities can gather, aggregate and normalize information from disparate and siloed city applications, including but not limited to traffic, lighting and parking. Combining this real-time sensor data with other city information, such as data from payment systems, citizen sentiment and analytic applications, Teradata is able to deliver prescriptive and predictive analytics, as well as easy-to-comprehend visualizations, that help city leaders make smarter, more informed decisions. Such a combined solution could, for example, automatically detect security incidents and generate alerts, locate traffic bottlenecks and optimize signals to ease congestion or evaluate route options to shorten emergency vehicle response time.