March 18: Increasing urbanisation is putting unprecedented pressure on city mayors to constantly balance the challenge of resource constraints against environmental sustainability concerns. Gartner, Inc. estimates that 1.1 billion connected things will be used by smart cities in 2015, rising to 9.7 billion by 2020.
Smart homes and smart commercial buildings will represent 45 percent of total connected things in use in 2015, due to investment and service opportunity, and Gartner estimates that this will rise to 81 percent by 2020. "Smart cities represent a great revenue opportunity for technology and services providers (TSPs), but providers need to start to plan, engage and position their offerings now," said Bettina Tratz-Ryan, research vice president at Gartner.
Gartner defines a smart city as an urbanised area where multiple sectors cooperate to achieve sustainable outcomes through the analysis of contextual, real-time information shared among sector-specific information and operational technology systems.
"The majority of Internet of Things (IoT) spending for smart cities will come from the private sector. This is good news for TSPs as the private sector has shorter and more succinct procurement cycles than public sectors and cities," said Ms. Tratz-Ryan.
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Gartner Newsroom
