When it comes to building so-called smart cities -- the data-driven, ubiquitously connected cities of the future where everything from traffic signals to law enforcement to trash collection is optimized to algorithmic precision -- IBM has largely driven both the narrative and the marketplace. But a new partnership between Cisco and Swiss technology and analytics firm AGT International suggests Big Blue isn't the only one that thinks there's big money in making over the world's civic infrastructure.

    The Cisco/AGT alliance plans to roll out its own flavor of smart city technologies across 30-50 cities worldwide over the next five years, leveraging the emerging "Internet of Things" to drive efficiency up, costs down, and associated revenues to $1 billion annually by 2020. The strategic partnership will meld a range of Cisco's vast hardware and software tools with AGT's expertise in civic data analytics and predictive software to create novel architectures that, if all goes to plan, will help cities both generate and manage huge amounts of data, initially for traffic management and public safety purposes. (More applications, including smart grid management, are in various phases of development.)

    But perhaps more interesting is the fact that IT powerhouse Cisco (CSCO) is making a concerted push into the municipal space in the first place. "We believe the future of competition is going to be between cities," say Wim Elfrink, Cisco's executive vice president for industry solutions and chief globalization officer. "Economically, but also socially. Where do young people want to live, to work? So it's also a competition for talent, and for environment. Energy consumption, pollution -- there are more and more criteria that people care about."

    Cisco has actually been active in this space for several years now, though not as visibly or actively as IBM (IBM), whose Intelligent Operations Center software is deployed in cities across the globe to help manage various aspects of civic operations. For its part privately held AGT is a relatively young company (just seven years old), but with revenues of $1.2 billion the Zurich-based company has established itself as a presence in the city management technology space, helping cities like resource- and space-constrained Singapore leverage data and technology into greater efficiency. The aim of the Cisco/AGT partnership, Elfrink says, is to take advantage of the growing Internet of Things -- the explosion of devices, appliances, automobiles, and other physical objects beyond computers and smartphones that are plugged into the Internet -- and enhanced data analytics tools to solve the current and future challenges faced by cities around the globe, which are growing at a rate of 10,000 people per hour according to Cisco.

    所谓的智慧城市是指，未来的城市由数字驱动，连接无所不在。在那里，从交通灯号到执法、再到垃圾收集，一切经过最优设计之后都达到了算法的精度。而一谈到建设智慧城市，我们总是想到这个话题和市场的主要驱动者：IBM公司。但思科公司(Cisco)与瑞士技术和分析公司AGT国际(AGT International)最新缔结的伙伴关系显示，“蓝色巨人”(Big Blue )并不是唯一一家认为全球市政基础设施蕴含着巨大钱景的公司。

    思科与AGT联盟计划于未来5年内在遍及全球的30至50个城市推出独具一格的智慧城市技术。他们将充分利用新兴的“物联网”(Internet of Things)以提高效率，降低成本，同时力争在2020年之前推动相关收入达到年均10亿美元。这项战略伙伴关系将融合多种庞大的思科软硬件工具和AGT在市政数据分析及预测软件领域的专长，以创建新奇的架构。如果一切顺利，这些架构将帮助城市催生和管理海量数据，最初将用于交通管理和公共安全目的。（更多应用，包括智能电网管理，将出现在不同的开发阶段。）

    但另外一个事实也许更有意思，那就是，信息产业巨头思科公司正在大举进军市政领域。“我们相信，未来的竞争将在城市之间展开，”思科公司产业解决方案事务执行副总裁兼首席全球化官维姆•埃尔夫林克说。“既是经济竞争，也是社会竞争。年轻人想在哪里生活，在哪里工作？所以，它也是一种人才竞争，环境竞争。能源消耗、污染程度，人们关心的标准越来越多。”

    近几年来，思科其实一直活跃在这个领域，尽管它不像IBM那样醒目和积极。全世界有不少城市通过IBM的智能运营中心软件(Intelligent Operations Center)管理自己的市政运营的各个方面。私人持有的AGT是一家相对年轻的公司（仅有7年历史），但凭借高达12亿美元的营业收入，这家位于苏黎世的公司已经确立了它在城市管理技术领域的地位。这家公司曾经帮助新加坡等资源和空间有限的城市利用数据和技术提升运营效率。埃尔夫林克表示，思科与AGT结为合作伙伴是为了利用蓬勃兴起的“物联网”技术（除电脑和智能手机之外，许许多多的物理实物正在被接入互联网，比如各种设备，家电和汽车）和功能增强的数据分析工具，以解决全球各地城市当前和未来面临的种种挑战。思科方面透露称，这些城市正在以每小时新增10,000人的速度急剧扩张。

    If all that sounds a lot like what IBM's Smarter Cities already does for its civic clients around the globe, that's because it is. But the Cisco/AGT partnership is starting from a different place and time, and the differences between the two are more philosophical, says AGT founder and CEO Mati Kochavi. While both companies rely on the proliferation and installation of inexpensive sensors, Cisco and AGT aim to alleviate the costs associated with installing new sensors by instead focusing on connecting the sensors that are already out there. (Further cost and IT burden will be alleviated by hosting all that data and some of the computation in the cloud -- Cisco's cloud, to be precise.)

    One primary source of sensor data will be citizens themselves via a series of smartphone and tablet apps that will connect people directly to their city governments (and vice versa) in a way that ensures citizens have to participate in the system to solve their own problems and that -- because of the direct digital link between citizen and city government -- agencies can't ignore those issues that citizens bring to their attention. Corollary to this, Kochavi says, will be a stringent focus on individual privacy -- something both governments and citizens are keenly aware of in the wake of the ongoing NSA data collection scandal. Where possible data will be anonymized, that data which is not needed could be discarded rather than stored, and citizens would have control over how much of their own data they share and how precise that data is.

    "I believe when we enter the Internet of Things we're talking about another layer of information that's bigger than social media," Kochavi says. "We don't want to wake up in five years and find out again that we should have done things differently."

    That reliance on personal data via citizen-owned devices plugged into the Internet of Things could make Cisco/AGT's architecture precariously dependent on peoples' willingness to share information, but Kochavi thinks they will, especially since doing so means they'll also get information and services in return that will help improve their own lives. Such a system will impose transparency on government, Kochavi says, "closing the circle" between cities and citizens.

    The partnership hasn't yet disclosed where it will begin the rollout of its technology, but Kochavi says the first client city will be announced in roughly two months. From there it plans to expand rapidly to dozens of cities over the next three to five years, focused largely in Europe, Asia, and South and Central America.

    如果这一切听起来非常像IBM的智慧城市（Smarter Cities）技术眼下已经在为全球各地的城市客户所做的事情，那是因为，事实的确如此。但AGT国际公司创始人兼首席执行官马蒂•柯查威说，思科与AGT联盟是从一个不同的地点和时间开始的，它们与IBM两者的差异更多地体现在理念方面。虽然两家公司都依赖于廉价传感器的扩散和安装，但思科和AGT致力于连接已经安装到位的传感器，希望以这种方式减轻与安装新传感器相关的成本。【未来，所有这些数据的存储和其中一部分计算将通过云技术（准确地说，是思科公司的云计算服务）来完成，以达到进一步降低成本、减轻IT负担的目的。】

    公民自身将成为传感器数据的主要来源——传感器将通过一系列智能手机和平板电脑应用程序把人们直接与市政府连接在一起（反之亦然）。这种数据收集方式需要确保公民必须参与这套系统才能解决自己碰到的问题；由于公民与市政府通过数字技术直接联系在一起，相关机构不能忽视公民向它们提出的议题。柯查威说，这将自然而然地导致人们更加关注个人隐私——鉴于尚未平息的国家安全局(NSA)数据收集丑闻，政府和公众对这个问题都非常敏感。未来可能收集到的数据将进行匿名化处理，没有用处的数据可能会被丢弃，而不是存储，民众将掌控自身数据被共享的数量和精确度。

    “我相信，等到我们进入物联网时代，我们要讨论的将是另一个层级的信息，它的规模将远大于社交网络，”柯查威说。“我们不希望在5年后的某天醒来时，发现我们又做了不该做的事。”

    对个人数据（通过接入物联网的公民设备获得）的这种依赖性可能会使思科和AGT架构对人们分享信息的意愿产生一种危险的依赖，但柯查威认为人们肯定愿意，特别是因为这样做意味着他们也将获得来自市政府的信息和服务，有助于他们改善自己的生活。这套系统将对政府工作的透明度提出强制性的要求，从而将“形成城市和公民之间完整的循环，”柯查威说。

    思科与AGT联盟尚未透露他们打算率先在哪里推出这项技术，但柯查威透露说，第一位城市客户将在大约两个月内公布。随后，这项联盟计划在未来3至5年迅速扩展到其他几十座城市，欧洲、亚洲、南美洲和中美洲将成为重点推进区域。（财富中文网）

    译者：叶寒