Saudi Gazette DUBAI – With smart cities and smart nations competing around the world to reach the highest connectivity they can possibly achieve, executives at the 2015 Internet of Things World Forum hosted by Cisco agreed it is no longer affordable to live without digitizing. "Today, the world can no longer afford to live the way we've been living before," said Amr Salem, the global managing director of smart cities, IoE at Cisco, on the sidelines of the IoTWF held in Dubai this year. Speaking to Saudi Gazette, Salem said smart cities today are a necessity to be able to meet the future's demands of feeding the world's population and cater to the urban migration. "More than 50 percent of people live in cities today," he said. "Twenty years ago, it was less than 30 percent." When asked about what makes a city smart and sustainable, he said, "Smart cities are about making people happy by having a sustainable environment economically, socially, and environmentally." Happiness, explains Salem, is when people are safe, have jobs, have adequate access to schooling, healthcare, transportation, and security. On the global trend towards smart cities, Salem says there's "a lot of momentum" where cities want to move towards that direction and "improve the quality of life". Saudi Arabia has also joined the global wave towards smart cities in initiating plans to upgrade infrastructure in a number of sectors, namely railway, sewage, and healthcare among others. Speaking to Saudi Gazette, senior director of the Middle East and Africa SP Sales at Cisco Paolo Campoli named several major trends in the Kingdom when it comes to IoT technology. "What we've noticed in the last couple of years in the Kingdom is a hyper accelerated consumption of mobile data," he said. "It's faster than any other economy in the region." The Kingdom's tendency to use media data is mainly due to a strong preference for non-linear digital entertainment rather than classical linear TV. "On the supply side, Mobily, Zain, and STC have invested heavily by improving in capacity and usability quite fast," he added. He adds there are efforts in partnering with a major service provider in the region in investigating the future after pure connectivity. "We need to make IoT connectivity platform way more robust," says Campoli. The other trend is creating a new monetizing model to replace the classical billing model. All players are seeking to monetize IoT connectivity in a different way by coming up with a different billing scheme, says Campoli. The Kingdom is also looking into how to start creating an ecosystem with local application developers on top of IoT. "Local developers would understand the local needs to create the ecosystem," says Campoli, who confirmed the general consensus at the IoTWF that the future lies in start-up companies and the need to include local application developers to control the behavior of the network. Nonetheless, a number of obstacles have created a slow-down effect for Saudi Arabia's plans to become smart. "One is doing things vertically rather than horizontally," Campoli said. "There needs to be vertical knowledge in IoT to identify the key vertical industry problems". However, he added, open data should be able to create value by widening the horizontal platform in order to break silos. Similarly, a need for standardization is important to design an effective IoT ecosystem. Another major factor for a successful digitization transition is a top-down driving force. Campoli says, "The grand vision has to come from the government ruler." "But the tangible benefit has to be measurable in the short term. It has to be a balance between having a long-term vision and the ability to focus on used cases." The latter helps in achieving a real understanding of the vertical needs. When asked about the risk of staying disconnected for people living outside smart cities, Campoli said, "Smart cities are not necessarily smart, huge, urban conglomerates. There could be smart villages where there is affordable connectivity, higher efficiency in social inclusion, remote healthcare, education, and such." "Those not latching on the journey to digitalization and smart cities would be left behind," he adds. "It's a necessity today."
