What makes a smart city? A truly smart city is more than just connected street lights,trash cans, and booking a parking space with a smart swipe. Smart cities use data available from connected devices to benefit their citizens. However,when all these connected apps and their associated data exist in silos, the full value of the potential insight from this data sits untouched.

To fully harness the power of the IoT ecosystem, city officials should think of the smart city itself as an infrastructure service platform for building highly interconnected applications. The city provides the primary repository for collected data which acts as a platform on which applications can be created to enhance the life of residents. At the same time, by providing such an IoT application creation platform and exposing collected data for innovators to build on, the city monetizes its smart city investments by charging for access to valuable data. “Too often smart city initiatives drain city resources instead of replenishing them. A city that makes money as it gets smarter is a truly smart city”, quotes Dean Hamilton,SVP and General Manager IoT Products and Solutions,Accelerite.

A wholly owned business of Persistent Systems, Silicon Valley headquartered Accelerite, has been brought into existence to bring productcentric alignment to business models, strategies, sales, and operations.

Smart City Way of Monetizing Data
An IoT service creation and enrichment platform such as Accelerite Concert is a smart way to build-and monetize- a rich IoT application ecosystem that leverages the massive amounts of data collected by the smart city. Concert

API Management and Monetization capabilities to go beyond the initial OPEX based business cases that justified the initial IoT investment and create additional markets for the derived data. Engineered to build an IoT application ecosystem, the Concert IoT platform enables companies to build and deliver their IoT solutions on popular public and private clouds, including AWS IoT, Microsoft Azure IoT Hub, and IBM Watson IoT. Accelerite's Concert Monetization is a suite of technologies that creates revenue generating, innovative partner ecosystems and helps companies realize more ambitious "Digital Transformation” goals of 'X as a Service'. The platform is designed to support the self-service monetization of data/insight using Concert offers 'Ecosystem Enrichment',i.e. Store-front, a technology that allows customers to easily build powerful data market places. The Concert Monetization Engine(CME)calculates payments (for Data Consumer Partners) and settlements (for Data Producer Partners) on a per partner basis as defined in the Partner Portal.

smart city problems. As a piece of testimonial, Accelerite's solid waste management solution (enabled by Concert IoT) comes with support for GPS based tracking of collection vehicles. An RFID tag is attached to each bin which is scanned by the collecting truck to capture the location data and the time-stamp. The solution assigns bins to each truck to define work allocation and helps optimize collection vehicle route plan to reduce 'truck rolls' and miles traveled. More over, Accelerite's IoT enabled mobile workforce management platform (called Concert FieldForce) provides realtime access to current location and the historic trail of field workforce with smart task management features to empower a company’s field workforce. The platform configures forms and workflows according to industry and business-specific Standard Operating Procedures (S.O.P.s). Smart task management features dispatch tasks to appropriate field staff, based on specified criteria, such as skill and proximity, and enable more tasks to be completed successfully during the first site visit.

In a recent turn of events, JMG Systems with the help of Accelerite Concert developed an IoT solution powered by cellular and satellite-enabled telematics to provide machine manufacturers, dealers and site owners with remote monitoring and control for engine driven industrial machines. JMG required a cloud with capabilities to remotely monitor and run reports on machine and engine performance. Integration of the JMG telematics unit on machines over cellular and satellite data channels was also of concern.Concert enabled visual drag and drop creation of realtime services and dashboards that allowed anyone at JMG to innovate, without coding. Concert served as a cloud neutral development environment that insulated developers from public cloud proprietary APIs, thus eliminating vendor lockin.

"Our mission, in the years ahead, is to make it easier for companies to continually transform themselves as the technology landscape evolves", says Dean. According to Dean, Accelerite will continue bringing innovations that will allow even the most complex new technologies to be leveraged by the business without risky and costly custom development projects.