“Smart Cities are one of the key areas of growth for Nokia”

As communications is a central fabric that weaves a number of solutions together – Smart Cities enablement is becoming a big segment with a number of global cities moving ahead to create seamless communications driven infrastructure for public usage.

Smart cities Spokesperson - Jacques Vermeulen, Director, Smart Cities Customer Operations, Nokia speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the Nokia’s current strategy on smart cities and how it is looking forward to growing in this segment.
How can operators script success in the age of smart cities? In your opinion, how big is the opportunity to enable communications and widespread connectivity for smart cities?

Within a Smart City solution communications is and will remain a substantial part of the solution. Providing a flexible, secured and total cost of operations optimized IT and communications infrastructure will remain a key asset. Operators are evolving their strategy to position themselves for the future

How do you as an organization look at this growing opportunity today?

Smart Cities are one of the key areas for growth for Nokia. We have a robust end-to-end converged portfolio, to address emerging opportunities in smart cities. We have setup dedicated Go-To-Market teams in order to provide best in class solutions to this market world-wide.

What are some of your products and solutions that you can position for this space?

Nokia’s smart city solution is designed to provide the ‘building blocks’ for enabling new smart city applications that can be rapidly created, deployed and managed.

We deliver products, tools and services for city devices and sensors, city-wide access, a city shared network for aggregation and backhauling of data communication, city cloud architectures, IoT service creation, security and threat intelligence, device and connectivity management platforms, data collection, analytics, application enablement and ecosystem, while addressing customer experience, security, scalability and professional services.

For example, through our extensive mobile networks and small cells portfolio we provide cellular and Wi-Fi coverage and capacity to outdoor and indoor locations. We also provide a mission critical Wide Area Network (WAN), leveraging our IP/MPLS, optics, and microwave products portfolio, as well as our unified service aware network manager, converges multiple point to point legacy networks into a single IP backbone supporting all city agencies’ needs. We offer City Cloud networking solutions to help cities reap all the benefits of an open cloud architecture, in a secure manner. Our open cloud networking offer comprises Nuage Networks SDN and Data Center interconnect, offering low latency and highly-secure connections in between data-centers. The IoT Community ecosystem of the ng Connect Program innovative companies together to collaborate on solution concepts, end-to-end prototypes, business models, and market trials

Please share some of the global trends that are likely to create big impact in this space today?

The ability of generating measurements in more areas than known today (from environmental to mobility to social) together with the real time ICT infrastructure solutions and real time handling of massive data sets will provide opportunities beyond imagination for Smart Cities investing in horizontal platforms today.