Smart City API Reference Architecture Establishes a Platform Business Model for Portable and Interoperable Smart City Solutions, Enabling Innovative Data Monetization Strategies

MORRISTOWN, NJ — November 16 , 2016 —TM Forum, the global industry association for digital business, today announced a joint collaboration program (JCP) with the FIWARE Foundation to co-develop a Smart City API Reference Architecture enabling portability and interoperability of smart city solutions as well as a repeatable data economy model. This initiative presents significant opportunities for cities, communications service providers, technology suppliers and other parties to realize their part in the API economy, which according to IBM, will be a $2.2 Trillion market by 2018.

The collaboration between TM Forum and FIWARE is a natural extension of FIWARE’s previously announced support for TM Forum Open APIs, which are widely used in the communications industry, and are now available as part of the Business Framework components of the FIWARE platform. FIWARE is building an open sustainable ecosystem around public, royalty-free and implementation-driven software platform standards to ease the development of new smart applications in multiple sectors.

Recognizing its growing adoption by cities, TM Forum will incorporate the FIWARE NGSI API into its Smart City API Reference Architecture, thereby exposing FIWARE to TM Forum’s diverse global ecosystem of city governments, communications service providers, technology suppliers and global enterprises. The FIWARE NGSI API provides access to contextual information about what is going on in cities in near real-time, and can be adopted by cities, service providers and technology suppliers who wish to benefit from and monetize real-time open data.

“FIWARE NGSI is becoming a de-facto standard API for real-time open data thanks to its growing adoption by cities,” said Juanjo Hierro, CTO of the FIWARE Foundation. “The collaboration with TM Forum will further drive this momentum and also support cities moving to the next phase which is to become enablers of the Data Economy.”

“Cities providing a digital platform business model will unlock innovation and economic growth for their whole population as well as the broader ecosystem of service providers and suppliers,” continues Carl Piva, vice president of strategic programs at TM Forum and head of the Smart City Forum. “This is not about creating mobile apps used only by a few, but rather fostering economic growth and bringing local communities together by creating meaningful services based on what is happening in the city, covering all aspects of city life.”

The collaboration between TM Forum and FIWARE also includes a series of workshops with cities wishing to develop an urban data economy as well as a smart city academy program targeting architects and developers of smart city solutions who are interested in learning how these solutions can be designed to be portable across cities adopting the Smart City API Reference Architecture.

“Smart Cities will no longer be only about performing a more efficient management of municipal services but transforming cities into enablers of an Economy of Data,” said Ulrich Ahle, CEO of the FIWARE Foundation. “The collaboration program between TM Forum and the FIWARE Foundation will be instrumental in supporting cities that agree on this vision and wish to move into execution.”