Red Hat, Inc., the world’s provider of open source solutions, has announced collaboration with FIWARE Foundation, a non-profit association that encourages the adoption of open standards for the development of smart solutions, to build an integrated, smart city platform that can enable cities across the world to be more resilient and improve citizens’ wellbeing with data.
During a six week residency, Red Hat Open Innovation Labs worked jointly with FIWARE Foundation and Human Oriented Products (HOPU), a solution provider member of the FIWARE community, to create an easy-to-deploy, fully scalable, and robust open source enhanced smart city solution powered by FIWARE, running on Red Hat OpenShift.
Globally, cities are facing growing and complex environmental, economic and social challenges that affect the daily lives of their citizens. To address these challenges, city officials and public sector decision makers need eco-smart technology solutions that unleash the power of data to help make the right decisions for both citizens and the environment. Together, FIWARE Foundation, HOPU and Red Hat developed a more scalable, smart city solution that any city in the world can use to be smarter and more sustainable. Processing data collected through HOPU air quality sensors, the smart city platform powered by FIWARE is capable of extracting the insights that help adopt smarter decisions for the wellbeing of citizens. Two cities in Spain—Las Rozas and Cartagena—served as pilot use cases for the implementation of the smart city platform and air quality monitoring base application. Red Hat OpenShift provides the flexibility needed for the smart city platform and base application to deploy on any private or public cloud, improving its scalability and robustness.
Throughout the Open Innovation Lab residency, Red Hat’s expert consultants helped FIWARE Foundation and HOPU engineers to gain the skills and adopt the tools and open practices needed to standardize an end-to-end hosting agnostic deployment process and set up a demo environment for the solution. With a goal of improving engineers’ productivity, the Open Innovation Lab residency also focused on helping the team to establish a better foundation for collaboration and to map technology and cultural changes to align with their target mission.
Following the Red Hat Open Innovation Lab residency, the FIWARE Community can now expand the smart city platform to different use cases for any city in the world such as traffic, water sampling, noise and pollutants. By improving the deployability and scalability of FIWARE platform technologies, cities can accelerate innovation and transform their communities. FIWARE, currently adopted in over 350 cities globally, will be able to branch out to new markets and improve the adoption of open source standards.
Mike Walker, global head of Open Innovation Labs + Transformation Services, Red Hat, said, “Cities need the right technology to process data to make informed decisions when creating sustainable, efficient and thriving environments for their citizens. The Red Hat Open Innovation Lab residency enabled FIWARE smart city platforms to be easier to deploy and more usable by any city to improve its citizens’ quality of life.”
Juanjo Hierro, chief technology officer, FIWARE Foundation, said, “FIWARE is about democratizing the opportunities for cities to be smarter, no matter their size, and for providers to build solutions that are able to reach a larger and global market. Thanks to Red Hat, we go a step further in this democratization, since deployment and operation of smart city platforms and solutions powered by FIWARE is easier than ever. What used to take days, now can be done in a matter of minutes.”
