Microsoft Corporation on Wednesday announced a new global public service initiative at the annual Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference held in Houston, Texas.
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Called CityNext, the initiative plans to propel cities into sustainable habitats of tomorrow using the company’s core strength – information technology. Cloud services, apps, and other data platforms can be utilised by city governments and businesses to share data and drive efficiency in their respective operations, in turn enabling citizens to live better.
Currently, cities around the world are faced with rapid urbanisation. Over 50 per cent of the world’s population live in cities, said Microsoft, and the number is projected to rise to 70 per cent by 2050. The onslaught of people in these urban centres put immense pressure on existing infrastructure and systems, such as transport, water and energy, healthcare, and security. Not to mention, cities now are vulnerable to natural disasters and the effects of climate change, added the software leader.
To address these, the CityNext initiative will streamline “existing resources to build a sustainable model of innovation and support eight critical functions: government administration, public safety, healthcare, buildings, tourism, education, transportation and energy and water.”
Solutions will come in either one or all of three forms: cloud-enabled service, which decongests physical data storage and puts it online to provide real-time data access and easier departmental sharing and processing; enterprise-grade platform that consists of web-based applications and mobile gadgets, allowing government employees to obtain information anytime, anywhere; and, updates and unique additions to current systems, such as making it compliant to industry standards or creating synergy between different systems.
Laura Ipsen, corporate vice president of Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector, said, “Microsoft’s CityNext initiative puts people first and builds on this new era of collaborative technology … Working with our vast Microsoft Partner Network, we can scale solutions and services to do ‘New with Less,’ enabling cities to better compete in the global marketplace, drive citizen engagement, and foster economic, social and environmental sustainability.”
Schneider Electric is one of Microsoft’s partners in this campaign. The international energy management firm also wants to help boost efficiency across different urban services.
At the moment, the company has applications for electric, gas and water utilities that have been developed using Microsoft tools, shared Alistair Pim, vice president of global strategic alliances for Schneider Electric, on the company blog. He said, with the CityNext programme, these applications could take advantage of Microsoft’s Azure Cloud platform.
He explained, “What this really means to us is less time and money spent purchasing, operating, and maintaining infrastructure and platform technology, which directly translates to a faster return on investment … leaving more time to focus on developing valuable end user applications and providing a faster route to market. For our customers, we can now scale up the capacity of the offering on demand, roll out incremental enhancements and provide mobile workers with apps on numerous devices including Windows tablets.”
Similarly, Microsoft shared they are working with another CityNext partner, cloud software company Socrata, on creating public access to government performance information through Azure. Citizens, using their mobile devices, can log in to their cities’ ‘dashboards’ and check how their government leaders are performing in issues like healthcare and employment.
To date, Microsoft revealed that CityNext already has these following cities on-board the plan:
- Auckland, New Zealand
- Barcelona, Spain
- Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Hainan Province, China
- Hamburg, Germany
- Manchester, England
- Moscow, Russia
- Philadelphia, United States of America
- Zhengzhou, China
For Ipsen: “Even though cities are feeling the strain from economic challenges, we believe a new era of innovation will create opportunities for people to utilise technology to accomplish what they never thought possible. We’re inspired by our diverse partner ecosystem and know that working together we can help cities realise their full potential.”
