Dubai, UAE, December 6, 2015 – As the host city of the third annual Internet of Things World Forum (IoTWF) industry event, taking place December 6-8, Dubai will be a showcase for more than 20 digital city and connected industry solution deployments made possible by Cisco and the IoT industry.

Through a series of smart city experience tours, IoTWF attendees will see why Dubai is touted as one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. To expand upon last year’s IoTWF in Chicago, Dubai is featuring twice as many solutions than were featured at the 2014 event.

The deployments featured in the tours will include services such as connected parking, connected lighting and waste management, alongside other vertical industries. More importantly, attendees will have the opportunity to visualize these solutions as not only connected but interconnected and able to share data.

In Dubai’s Command and Control Center, nearly all the solutions are integrated into a digital platform as part of Cisco Smart+Connected Communities. The digital platform can aggregate data from various sensors, solutions, and partner applications; conduct advanced data analytics; and supports a wide spectrum of urban services.

Beyond Dubai, utilizing the digital platform in conjunction with the portfolio of Smart+Connected Communities solutions are helping cities being to achieve their digital transformation goals. For instance, a number of cities have made strides in reaching their COP21 climate goals by reducing traffic, encouraging greater use of public transit and streamlining the delivery of services to citizens.

Kansas City, MO in the US, Adelaide in Australia, Hamburg, Germany and Bangalore in India, for instance, have already begun using a single digital data platform for managing their urban services.

Now more than ever, cities are required to capture and analyze data coming from the many sensors, cameras and mobile devices in use. They are employing new analytics techniques, such as fog computing, that is able to gather, process, and conduct analysis right at the edge of a network, where it can be acted upon more immediately.

To accelerate the deployment of fog technologies, a coalition of Internet of Things leaders recently announced the formation of the OpenFog Consortium. It aims to enable end-to-end technology scenarios for the Internet of Things through the development of an open architecture, core technologies including the capabilities of distributed computing, networking, and storage as well as the leadership needed to realize the full potential of IoT. Cisco is a founding member of the newly formed consortium.

John Chambers, Executive Chairman of Cisco, will deliver a keynote at the IoTWF on how the Internet of Things is creating a new world of possibilities through digitization. As we move into this new digital era, organizations across both the private and public sectors are already beginning to rethink how they will approach the shift in infrastructures, processes and outcomes on a grand scale. It is likely to disrupt every area of society and redefine sustainability. Digitization has the potential to create a revolution in how we use resources, how we communicate, how we get work done and what we come to know about communities, ourselves and the world.

Dr. Sebastian Saxe** **, Chief Information Officer, Hamburg Port Authority:

“The reality is this: The reason we would look for a holistic model is that we have all this business going through the city, but it impacts the citizens. To create a model where we are able to do this without negatively impacting the citizens and the city itself is our goal.”

Mohammad Saeed Al Shehhi, Chief Operating Officer, Dubai Design District (d3):

“We, at Dubai Design District (d3), are very proud to be showcasing some of the real-time Smart initiatives that are being deployed at d3, during the Cisco Internet of Things World Forum. Our aim is to select and implement those Smart solutions that will bring significant benefits to business partners, visitors and management – and, importantly, to Dubai as a Smart City. Through these unique and technologically-enhanced initiatives, d3’s creative tenants will benefit by saving on utility consumption, they will receive an enriched customer experience, improved safety standards, and they will be able to tap into effective, real time data analytics that help drive their business forward.

The d3 Smart City platform is a showcase of how government entities and business associates can collaborate to provide the best services and applications for the population visiting and working at d3.”

Ms. Rama N.S., CEO of Bangalore’s Electronic City Industries Association (ELCIA):

"ELCIA has had an opportunity to study the data collected from the city digital platform lighting and parking use cases that were deployed in Bangalore Electronics City in Feb 2015 by the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities team and this data is proving to be very useful in helping ELCIA understand the energy consumed by public street lighting as well as the usage of on-street parking at the ELCIA campus. We are now beginning to socialize this data with other sensor devices / applications development companies in ELCIA so that they can manufacture, test and deploy new types of sensors and applications in the Living Lab that has been set up in partnership with Cisco.”

Jane Booth,** **General Manager City and Organisational Development Adelaide City Council:

“Adelaide City Council is committed to increasing the number of people who come to live, work, study, do business, relax and enjoy our City. Our Smart City pilots will help us demonstrate the value of a sensor-connected infrastructure to deliver new and improved citizen experiences. We want to empower and engage our residents, to deliver new City experiences, to share and optimize our City data to support new business development and entrepreneurs and to attract new investment into the City. Becoming a smart, connected and networked city will deliver this ambition.”

Anil Menon, President, Smart+Connected Communities, Cisco:

“We have passed the incubation phase, now IoT/smart city solutions are ready to be scaled. Cities who scale first will be the winners in an increasingly competitive environment. As host to the 2015 IoTWF, Dubai is rapidly transforming into becoming one of the smartest digital cities in the world connecting the unconnected through the power of intelligent networks.”

For more on the Internet of Things World Forum, check out the latest blog from Cisco. http://blogs.cisco.com/ioe/celebrating-the-internet-of-things-journey-at-iot-world-forum