Cisco to build Asia's first Internet of Things innovation hub in India

Riding on India's fast growing internet penetration, the collaboration will help establish the foundation for a new ecosystem to help Electronic System Design and Manufacturing (ESDM) companies and other companies of electronic city engage on IoT product development, the company officials said.

ELCIA has been chosen for this ambitious project as it is the only brown field ESDM cluster in the country, which has received an in principle approval for a financial grant from the government of India to spur innovation in product design and manufacturing, they added.

Electronics City is the biggest hub of Bangalore's IT industry located in the outskirts of the city. Spread over 800 acres, it houses 186 companies including biggies like Infosys and Wipro. The companies here have a combined turnover of over Rs 40,000 crore.

"Digitisation of the the country is what we are trying to do here in India, it is digitisation of Industry where we are trying to transform healthcare, aerospace and everything else; to do that we need to create new ecosystem, we need to create new models of businesses, we need to create new platforms and new innovation...

"...that is what we are trying to do with Electronics City Industries Association," CISCO president, Smart+Connected Communities and deputy chief globalisation officer Anil Menon told reporters here.

According to officials as part of this effort, Cisco will help provide the network infrastructure and expertise for testing and production of electronic product prototypes for an IoT enabled smart city environment.

Through the 'Living Lab'spread across 5 sq km area in the electronics city, ESDM start-ups and other electronic city companies can build solutions for City Infrastructure Management (CIM) including smart parking, smart CCTV surveillance, smart street lighting, smart water management/leak detection and community messaging.

The project will utilise the Cisco Smart+Connected City Wi-Fi solution that will help enable community Wi-Fi services and allow access to public utility offerings.

ELCIA will also embed Cisco network equipment comprising access points, routers, switches, and other required hardware and software applications that will be connected to the smart city's fibre-optic backbone network, they added.

He said the first phase of this smart city project will be rolled out in Electronics City and will serve as a replicable model for the rest of Bangalore as well as other cities in India, across the region and other emerging markets.

Participating companies would gain access to boot strap funding for their ventures under Cisco's IoT Innovation Fund, provided there is a strong idea for new IoT product/ application development with a commercially viable business case, as well as a chance to participate in the global Cisco IoT Challenge, Menon said.

The company officials said this project was being undertaken as part of the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities concept and the focus is on using the network to deploy digitally enabled transportation, healthcare, education, utilities, energy grid and real estate in cities.

Such project has been done in six countries that include Barcelona in Spain, Nice in France, Hamburg in Germay, Songdo in Korea, and work is on at couple of cities in Australia, they stated.

To a question on when the project be completed, an official said: "the work on this will start next week, by Deewali, October-November time frame we should have the infrastructure ready, then it will go into soft testing for about four weeks, by end of December it should be ready that is the plan which we have."

"....the intention is to attract companies based in electronics city to come be a part of this ecosystem and develop the new generation product, which we can take to market not only for smart city projects across India but emerging countries," they added.