HPE's IoT Platform to Anchor a New Smart Cities Experience Center

A wide range of cutting edge internet of things (IoT) innovations will be the focus of a new Smart Cities Experience Center being created through a partnership between HPE and longtime strategic partner PwC.

The center, which is the first such facility being assembled by HPE and PwC, was unveiled June 6 at HPE's Discover conference in Las Vegas, is being created to support ideas and products from both companies as the IoT continues to expand into the worlds of consumers and businesses, HPE revealed in an announcement at the event.

The Smart Cities Experience Center will be underpinned by HPE's Universal IoT Platform, with the goal of encouraging development, testing and management initiatives for IoT applications in a wide range of uses. The work done within the center will aim to help increase and drive the scale, security and speed of IoT services for customers.

"IoT is a quickly expanding part of the digital revolution and it requires partners to team together," Nigel Upton, HPE's general manager of its Universal IoT platform, wrote in a post on the company's blog. "No one vendor can do it all," he continued, explaining the key reason for the partnership and for the creation of the experience center.

To begin the project, HPE and PwC plan to showcase IoT examples to help major cities leverage technology to fight community challenges that could benefit from IoT approaches, including urbanization and associated social, environmental and economic issues. 

"The PwC use cases will help manage the complexity of a city's many and diverse endpoint devices (such as smart utility poles, traffic junctions and intelligent waste bins), collecting data and connecting objects across multiple communication layers," from cellular to Wi-Fi, satellite and fixed Line, wrote Upton. 

"Ultimately, the PwC use cases provide governments, organizations and enterprises with [products] that span the edge of connected devices back to central IT and applications for tighter alignment―providing real-time insights that are more predictable and repeatable, even as the expanse of connected devices and data continues exponential growth," he continued. "Together, HPE and PwC will accelerate business and IT transformation for the internet of things, drive greater time to value for governments, municipalities and their tech-savvy citizens."

Mike Krell, a senior IoT analyst with research firm Moor Insights & Strategy, told ITPro that HPE's partnership with PwC makes a lot of sense because of PwC's activity in the IoT market thus far. "The number of potential IoT applications for smart cities is endless," he said. "HPE is leveraging PwC's accumulated knowledge of existing problems, systems and relationships in the space to accelerate deployments."  

In addition, existing relationships with systems integrators count for a lot, he said, which will also likely be a boon for both sides. "They have history and knowledge that takes a long time to duplicate and it's smart to partner with companies like PwC instead of trying to become a subject matter expert overnight."

Under the deal, HPE will do what it does best by providing technology products and innovations to address IoT markets, while PwC will also do what it does best, by stitching together technologies and services that meet customer needs, wrote Krell.