Cisco revealed a series of strategic initiatives to help accelerate the digital transformation of Telangana.
As part of the digital transformation initiative, the Government of Telangana has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Cisco, for a Digital Zone smart city project in Hyderabad.
The partnership will establish an Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Hub and a Living Lab near Hi-Tech City in Hyderabad, a Center of Excellence and Living Lab in T–Hub premises, remote education in 10 schools in Karimnagar, and deploying digital solutions at the historical landmark monument of Hyderabad, the Qutubshahi tombs.
The City Digital Platform (CDP) is also a part of the collaboration spanning the 2.2 km area near Hi-Tech City in Hyderabad, including smart Wi-Fi, smart parking, smart lighting, traffic analytics at key junctions, Remote Expert for Government Services (REGS), smart environmental sensors, smart waste management, and a smart control center to monitor and manage the city better.
In the Digital Zone project, Cisco will collaborate with local ecosystem solution providers to develop a scalable model for the effective rollout of its services across the state of Telangana.
The global expertise and intellectual property in the areas of IoT, mobile technology and applications, cloud computing, data analytics, social media, energy, and lighting solutions of Cisco will aid the development.
Cisco will also develop new applications specifically for Indian smart cities and collaborate with the state for its upcoming smart cities in Telangana, in collaboration with ecosystem partners in the state.
Cisco will set up a Centre of Excellence (CoE) and a Living Lab on the T-Hub premises to promote regional innovation, for partners and startups to build solutions around IoT and cyber security and involve in rapid prototyping.
Offering a platform to bring startups, accelerators, developers, researchers, ecosystem partners and the venture community together, it will display the possibilities of IoT.
In the CoE, Cisco would showcase its global smart cities platform, tagged City Digital Platform (CDP), which can integrate various smart city services onto a unified platform when integrated with Cisco Collaboration solutions and Cisco Mobility Services Engine.
The Cisco CoE will be hosted in the IIIT campus in T-Hub, a portion of the 70,000-square-foot building called Catalyst, which is to be the largest building in India to be solely dedicated to entrepreneurship.
Also, the state government of Telangana wants to foster remote education and quality fof faculty in all rural areas coming under it. Cisco will also work with the government to offer remote interactive education with virtual expert learning.
The latter will set up virtual video-based classrooms in 10 remote schools in Karimnagar district for inter-school learning connecting the district school to the remote schools for the sharing of faculty.
The schools will be joined over HD-quality video conferencing to share the faculty across the connected schools, while also enabling digital sharing of content, live streaming, recording, creation of a repository and accessing the content on demand.
Lastly, the collaboration will also lead to Cisco digitizing an important landmark and monument of Hyderabad, which is the Qutubshahi tombs close to the Golconda Fort, by adding to the experience of visitors and hence promoting tourism in the state.
Cisco will also deploy public Wi-Fi, surveillance, smart lighting and smart parking solutions to provide visitors and citizens details of each of the monuments in the area, alongside covering 3 acres of the monument site.
Cisco had earlier this year signed a MoU with the state in partnership with Paradigm Mtuity, to implement a pilot project under Hyderabad Smart City.
Under the Digital Telangana initiative, the government had launched 100 e-panchayats called ‘Digital Telangana Centres, managed by women and for offering 4G service in the entire state, the government is laying OFC to each household using the water grid trenches, while it is also mandatory to teach computers to every student from Class 6 onwards.
Vina Krishnan
