How Nivid Technologies connects people, places and things
The pace at which cities are adopting newer technologies including 5G, artificial intelligence (AI), drones, the internet of things (IoT) and cloud to transform themselves into smarter cities is growing exponentially as they strive to deliver unmatched service experience and cost-savings.
IoT as a technology has already secured its place in the digital transformation of cities to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions to solve complex metropolitan challenges of managing water, waste, energy, traffic, parking, ports, healthcare, environment, and emergency services, to name but a few.
Where does the problem lie?
Even though technology adoption is happening at a rapid pace, disparate data sources, connectivity technologies, high maintenance costs, and security risks present daunting challenges for chief information officers (CIOs) and city administrators to fully realise the business value of IoT implementations.
The reason is very simple: many enterprises do not recognise that there is a need for a platform to monitor, manage and leverage the data collected from IoT-enabled devices and gain business value.
From people and traffic flows to air quality, city management platforms aid the efficient operation of cities
This drives the need for a robust platform which is able to process, analyse and utilise the data and then convert such data into smart city solutions, delivering agile and cost-effective services, positive business outcomes and faster return on investments (ROI).
Urban planning isn’t a straightforward process. Complex research needs to be carried out, too many boxes may need to be checked, and countless bureaucracy tends to block the road toward effective problem-solving scenarios.
Not to mention that any potential development on that front must be thoroughly designed and tested in advance if they are to meet the expectations of a wide variety of stakeholders present within a given city.
In short, the process is time-consuming and calls for investment. As cities worldwide currently face budget constraints while also having to respond quickly to global pandemics, for instance, investing in critical infrastructure such as IoT platforms demands careful considerations and flexible partners.
As a result, Nivid Technologies and FIWARE have partnered to deliver high-performance solutions for collecting and managing data from the most diverse sources. Nivid’s complete suite of IoT solutions and out-of-the-box services address a critical gap in the marketplace and strives to make IoT adoption easier.
Nivid Technologies’ flagship solution N-Smart is a fully managed global IoT-as-a-service solution that seamlessly deploys, enriches and manages IoT assets and services. It combines and transforms data from a myriad of data sources into useful, contextual information for people to act upon, in a quick and effective fashion.
N-Smart is a modular, flexible, and scalable platform that provides a single pane of view for an end-to-end IoT solution. With a combination of cloud platforms and mobile apps, N-Smart enables enterprises to deploy and connect sensors, compute data and build custom applications, as well as monitoring and managing a global IoT solution in a highly scalable environment. It offers:
1) Real time insights
- Data visualisation with real-time location-based data maps
- Dynamically monitor, track and manage both mobile and fixed assets
- Combine real-time data to proactively address challenges, reduce risks, lower costs and increase operational efficiency
2) Monitoring and maintenance
- Authenticate, securely connect, configure and organize devices
- Continuously monitor devices, network parameters and failure indicators
- Automated firmware updates over the air
3) Scalable and flexible design
- Horizontal scalability to support multiple use-cases and solutions
- Open APIs to integrate with third-party platforms
- High availability for mission critical applications
4) Smart response
- Context-rich applications for optimising resources, asset management, engagement, safety and security
- Transform raw sensor data into actionable insights in a single pane of glass
- Unified environment to improve operations and management efficiencies
N-Smart comes with operational dashboards and capabilities such as complex event processing. It is a highly comprehensive platform with both big data and AI algorithm support. Following FIWARE’s open source and open common standards approach, this platform offers different APIs for third-party integration and advanced data-driven maps.
Use cases
The FIWARE platform enables the aggregation of cross-field information from distributed and smart data models, services and events and supplies these to users and service providers. It strives to address a key issue: how to manage context information, enable and perform updates and bring access to context simultaneously?
FIWARE NGSI API specifications have evolved over time, initially matching NGSIv2 specifications, and now aligned with the ETSI NGSI-LD standard. Some Context Broker implementations like Orion-LD, Stellio or Scorpio support NGSI-LD. The Orion-LD Context Broker supports both NGSI-LD and NGSIv2 for backward compatibility with the original Orion Context Broker, which supports NGSIv2.
Real-time and reliable data collected by the FIWARE platform helps developers create applications in a fast and easy manner. In simpler terms, solution providers benefit from knowing that their solutions can be connected with other applications or pieces of software – already developed and widely available – or that they can be replicated for multiple customers and sectors (not to mention across a wider variety of geographical locations), with relatively low adaptation costs.
A thriving community
FIWARE is industry-proven for IoT use-cases but there is more than meets the eye. Its community plays an active role in the evolution of ETSI NGSI-LD specifications – which were based on NGSIv2 – and is fully committed to delivering compatible open-source implementations across the spectrum.
Open standards, flexibility, scalability and transparency are key for building smart city solutions. FIWARE’s open-source platform components are the definition of reliability and, when combined with N-Smart, result in a wide scope for the development of smart solutions.
Nivid’s horizontal solution caters to different business domains including city and government, utilities and infrastructure, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, transportation and logistics, as well as agriculture.
Wrapping up
The internet of things is an eminent technology for any smart city vision. Orchestrating heterogeneous devices and huge amounts of data collected from these devices is key for IoT initiatives to succeed.
This is where Nivid’s solution can assist. N-Smart provides a single pane-of-glass view to manage the end-to-end IoT solution lifecycle in highly scalable environments to realise positive business values and accelerate IoT solution success with the flexibility, security and efficiencies of a single vendor and single platform for any smart city use case.
To learn more about Nivid’s centralised, efficient, and scalable platform, visit www.nsmart.io.