by Matt Diaks and Dan Mandell, with Chris Rommel | 08/28/2024

 

UK technology providers are shepherding a wave of emerging, lucrative smart city market opportunities for the embedded and IoT ecosystem. Smart cities refer to advanced urban areas that leverage a mix of cutting-edge technologies, across various use cases, to enhance the innovation, sustainability, and efficiency of these regions. The IoT, in the context of smart city development, serves as the crucial conduit for physical devices (e.g., traffic monitoring/control, lighting, vehicle charging, environmental monitoring, etc.) to enable data collection and communication between these devices. The UK has embraced smart city solutions, being among the first countries to formalize their integration into their most populous cities, across various urban infrastructure sectors. As UK companies forge strategic partnerships with public and private entities to deploy smarter infrastructure abroad, we envision a substantial growth period for IoT technology providers in that sector over the next decade and beyond.

For example, a 2019 collaboration between Telensa, a small UK smart street lighting provider, and Samsung SDS, the digital arm of Samsung, highlights the profitable potential of collaborations across IoT technology organizations. Telensa’s PLANet streetlight control application was used beside Samsung’s AI-enabled Brightics IoT platform, which specialized in retrieving and analyzing big data, to expand Smart City infrastructure to the US and South Korea. The year preceding their partnership with Samsung SDS, Telensa deployed its first smart city projects without an IoT platform. Upon integrating the Brightics IoT platform, Telensa bolstered its suite of lighting solutions and paved the way for its acquisition by Signify.

Boston’s own MBTA is seeing key enhancements driven by UK smart city expertise and partnerships. John Laing Group, a UK infrastructure firm, forged a Public Private Partnership with Cubic Corporation, an American fare collection systems company, to upgrade the MBTA’s incumbent fare collection system. Coined “Automated Fare Collection 2.0,” the collaboration’s desired outcome was a ubiquitous contactless payment system, enabling a greater array of payment options, more price discrimination capabilities, and shorter wait times. Despite funding-related impediments, John Laing is set to receive significant compensation resulting from their investment in the smart infrastructure required to modernize Boston’s MBTA systems.

The surge of data-driven decision making in smart cities has also introduced novel vulnerabilities, creating the need for advanced cybersecurity solutions to enforce smart city development. BT Group, a leading security provider in the UK, partnered with Microsoft to consolidate and scale its cybersecurity capabilities to fulfill this emerging market opportunity. BT combined its managed security service with Microsoft’s Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) service to deliver vulnerability prevention and remediation to over 180 countries. Following this 2021 partnership, BT emerged as a European leader in managed security services, offering effective protections for a multitude of private entities, aiding the enforcement of smart infrastructure across every smart city vertical.

As urban gentrification advances internationally, cities will continue to leverage IoT and related technologies to become “smart.” This trend offers abundant market opportunities for IoT solution providers to deliver smart infrastructure on a global scale.