IBM Smarter Cities Initiative Helps Cities Manage Infrastructure Through Analytics

LAS VEGAS — At its Pulse 2011 conference

here, IBM is slated to announce that it is

working with cities around the world to help them gain new efficiencies by

visualizing and analyzing their physical and digital assets in real time.

Indeed, as part of its Smarter Cities initiative, IBM

is announcing smarter cities projects in Cape

Fear, N.C; Henderson,

Nev.; Waterloo,

Ontario; the Emirate of Abu Dhabi; and new

results from an IBM First-of-a-Kind Research

project in Washington, D.C.

Increasingly, cities are leveraging the power of location to bring

efficiency to their operations and improve the customer experience, IBM

officials said. They are using IBM software

to get both a bird’s eye view of their city infrastructures — roads, buildings

and waterways — as well as insight into their operations underground or on the

street — the pipes, wires, streetlights, electrical meters, storm drains and

other assets that make up a city’s infrastructure. Some cities are using

embedded sensors to detect faulty pipes or broken streetlights to automatically

generate a work order for maintenance staffs.

“Cities around the world are getting smarter everyday by monitoring and

analyzing the data in their streets, pipes and buildings,” said David

Bartlett, vice president of Industry Solutions at IBM,

in a statement. “We see that these real-time analytical technologies are

driving a new level of intelligence that helps cities — big or small, new or

old — to gain more efficient, sustainable operations.”

For more, read the eWeek article: IBM Makes Cities Smarter with Location-Based Analytics.