Fulfilling the Vision of the Multiple Application Network

In the past year, many people have asked me about smart cities, and how useful they are for the citizens living in the city.

A study that we conducted clearly demonstrated that a majority of citizens do not feel sufficiently educated about what a smart city can do for them.

At DistribuTECH in San Antonio, Itron showed a sneak-peak of the vast applications its technology can offer to a smart city.

The event was especially exciting because Silver Spring Networks and Itron both presented at the event as one company for the first time. Less than a month after the closure of the acquisition, our teams collaborated to bring a real cohesion to the conference. Beyond the new company camaraderie, we showed an amazing combined offering, which is what inspired me to write this blog.

DistribuTECH was an excellent event to showcase Itron’s technology for smart cities.

I would categorize three main axes that we focus our development around:

• Resources and Infrastructure Management
• Data Analytics
• Improved City Services

These three axes bring incredible benefits to cities. Itron helps cities modernize their water metering and management systems to address such shortages. For example, our metering technology is addressing water scarcity in Rwanda. When I heard about the water crisis in South Africa, I realized Itron’s solutions could address the shortage of water and its disastrous consequences on people’s lives.

I am proud to see how my company helps cities to save resources and reduce energy consumption by orders of magnitude. Our solutions save them important dollars that can go toward meaningful services for their citizens and reduce their carbon footprint significantly.

Beyond water, we also showcased our solutions for electricity and smart lighting, which are core to our offerings. There are so many other important resources and infrastructure that a city has to manage.

To find solutions for all these challenges, we launched the Developer Program last year. In little more than six months from its launch, we demonstrated at DistribuTECH innovative, end-to-end solutions for:

• Parking management developed by Communithings,
• Intelligent traffic systems from Houston Radar and Axis,
• Intelligent digital displays developed by D3 Led,
• Air quality sensors developed by Aeroqual and eLichens,
• Methane sensors developed by New Cosmos,
• Radiation detectors developed by D-Tect,
• Manhole flood sensors developed by US3, and
• Pole tilt sensors for faster recovery from storms and natural disasters.

All these solutions have few things in common:

1. They all use the same network! Why is this important? For a city, this is a little bit like a family plan. It’s cheaper and simpler.
   1. All services use the same infrastructure, so the city doesn’t have to pay for extra infrastructure that is not only costly to install, but also to maintain.
   2. All the data flows to the same place, enabling fusion of data from different sensors for future analytics and facilitating billing.
2. All these applications leverage data analytics to derive meaningful outcomes for the city and its citizens. Many of them use Itron’s IoT Edge Router, which allows them to build analytics at the edge of our network.
3. All have direct impact on citizen’s lives, helping cities better serve their communities for better education, health and safety.

Smart cities and utilities are at the core of what Itron does. As cities and consumers around the world learn how impactful this technology can be for them, we will continue to strive for excellence and enable more innovations. We look forward showing you what is coming next!