Customer story
FIWARE powers eco-smart cities in collaboration with the Red Hat Social Innovation Program
FIWARE
In 2022, FIWARE started a partnership with the Red Hat® Social Innovation Program in the joint commitment of harnessing the power of open source technologies to solve global problems. This partnership enabled a cross-sector collaboration to build an improved open source, eco-smart city platform that cities of any size, around the world, can implement. A multi-disciplinary combined team of experts from Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, FIWARE Foundation, and Human Oriented Products (HOPU) -one of the most active solution providers in the FIWARE ecosystem- collaborated over six weeks to facilitate the implementation of an open source Smart City platform powered by FIWARE, using Red Hat® OpenShift®. The open source community will now have the potential to evolve this platform’s capabilities further and integrate additional solutions.
FIWARE is a non-profit organization, headquartered in Berlin, with the mission of building an open, sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free, and implementation-driven software platform standards for the development of smart solutions in multiple sectors, following a digital twin approach. Red Hat has been a platinum member of the FIWARE foundation since 2020 and still stands as a member of its board. More than 250 cities around the world have adopted FIWARE standards for the implementation of their Smart City strategy.
Challenge
Leveraging city-wide data for global outcomes
Cities and territories are responsible for delivering a good quality of life to their residents, despite facing growing and complex environmental, economic, and social challenges. To succeed, city officials and public sector decision-makers need access to high-quality technology to help them make the right decisions for both the citizens and the environment.
The ability to implement an IoT-enabled digital twin smart city platform grants any city the power to gather relevant big data from multiple sources and extract valuable insights, driving smart decisions for the benefit of all citizens. Thus, the biggest challenge is to effectively gather and process data at a very large scale while, at the same time, building an easy-to-deploy solution that is scalable and secure.
Solution
Creating sustainable, open technology on a global scale
To solve this issue and scale it to others worldwide, FIWARE and HOPU worked together with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs team on a purpose-driven engagement to build an easy-to-deploy, highly-scalable, production-ready, cloud-native, open source smart city platform based on FIWARE open standards, designed to improve livability and environmental sustainability.
We have transitioned from a complex process of deployment that takes days into a more automatic process that takes just minutes. Solutions that were previously only available to large cities will now be available for any city in the world, thanks to the combination of FIWARE technologies and Red Hat solutions.
While technology was the core component of the project, the collaboration and workflows between the three companies also needed to move seamlessly in order to succeed. The Open Innovation Labs team introduced open practices like impact mapping, event storming, and pair programming to align the team towards shared goals, prioritize outcomes, and integrate and improve this smart city technical solution.
This is not a purely technological project, thanks to working on culture, processes, and technology. And, thanks to putting engineers, business people, and the cities themselves in the same room, we manage to encourage these cities to become more ecological and sustainable.
The Smart Cities platform deploys efficiently using Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, with an architecture that suits a hybrid cloud approach. The combination of Red Hat OpenShift, FIWARE technology, and the HOPU air quality solution allow the Smart Cities platform to produce tangible benefits right from the beginning, while being expandable through additional future applications covering other critical areas such as traffic, water sampling, and noise for any city in the world.
Software and services
Learn more by watching the whole series
Business outcome
Unlocking innovation and new sustainability standards
The collaboration between Red Hat, FIWARE, and HOPU resulted in accelerated innovation by way of open source technology. FIWARE Smart Cities solution is now an attainable, scalable solution that streamlines the developer experience. This will allow other cities, individual contributors, integrators, or other tech companies to make future contributions to the Smart Cities platform by adding other use cases over time, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning components, that will evolve this solution even further.
Today, cities in Spain have implemented this smart solution with different use cases such as air quality sensors, waste collection management, and traffic, demonstrating their commitment to citizens’ well being. Using scalable, reliable technology unlocks the potential for cities around the world to innovate, increase sustainability, and improve their citizen’s quality of life.
There are so many people all over the world trying to create solutions that will transform their communities…This collaboration with the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs has allowed us to create a very easy- to-deploy version of FIWARE and this is something that we believe is going to change the world.....
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