[Fiware-office-comms] New announcement: TELEFÓNICA, ORANGE, ENGINEERING and ATOS join forces

[Belén Kayser]

Dear all,

I am glad to share with you the last FIWARE announcement. Feel free to
spread the word.

Best wishes,

Belén

*TELEFONICA, ORANGE, ENGINEERING and ATOS join forces to push common
standards for Smart Cities based on the FIWARE platform*

*The companies commit to deliver commercial offerings and provide their
support to the establishment of an open source community around FIWARE. *

Simple, Open, Free and standardized: enabling the new future for Smart
Cities services.

*Barcelona, March 3**rd** 2015*. Telefónica, Orange, Engineering and Atos
have decided to join forces and announce that they will take the initiative
towards creation of the FIWARE Open Source Community to foster and support
the evolution of standards for Smart Cities and their spread worldwide. It
is expected that the FIWARE Open Source Community will be fully operational
at the end of Q2-2015.

With the enormous growth in the number of smartphones, daily life has
become digital but in cities remains very similar to how it looked like 15
or 20 years ago. The integration of Internet of Things, Cloud and BigData
technologies, together with the support of Open Data policies, will create
the conditions for a new period of intense transformation of cities into
smart cities. For Bruno Fabre, Executive Vice-President of Telcos, Media &
Utilities in Atos, “the Smart City market has proven to be a slow process.
The combination of open-source solutions and a new approach for business
models will unlock this new opportunity for the Third Digital Revolution”.

However, the concept of “Smart City” is also under (r)evolution, since it
will not just be focused on providing more efficient services, but
transforming cities into digital platforms enabling the development of
innovative citizen services open to all, bringing the fuel for a new
economical boost, fostering growth and the creation of new jobs. The four
companies strongly believe that FIWARE will be instrumental in
materializing this vision. “FIWARE does not just support a more efficient
management of municipal services. It brings open standards enabling to
transform cities into engines of growth”, explains Marieta Rivero, Chief
Deputy Commercial Officer at Telefónica. “Using FIWARE, Smart Cities can
deliver the platform, combining Open Data and the APIs based on which new
innovative applications can be created”, she explained.

Thanks to the open nature of FIWARE specifications, multiple FIWARE
providers may emerge so that cities and application providers can avoid
getting lock-in. On the other hand, decisions to choose a given FIWARE
platform provider will be driven, not only based on costs, but also on
trust, e.g. who will provide and operate the environment where applications
and/or data will be



 hosted. This is particularly relevant when data (e.g. those affecting
personal information) have to comply with local and/or national regulations
or has to cope with some security and privacy requirements, especially if
applications or data are to be hosted on the Cloud. Paolo Pandozy, CEO of
Engineering, states: “Innovation for Engineering is a key success factor
continuously pursued from its birth back in 1980. Tightly coupled with
innovation is independence, meaning we all build our solutions taking into
consideration what we consider to be the best for our customers. In this
context, we see our strategic and full involvement in FIWARE. It is a set
of technologies allowing us to be leaders in the market of open solutions.
In addition, Openness and Innovation are critical building blocks in the
fast growing domain of Smart Cities for which Engineering is providing a
leading edge innovative offering”.

FIWARE standard APIs, combined with standard data models developed together
with cities and application developers, will ensure portability and
interoperability of smart city applications. This will allow to develop
smart city applications for different cities at the same time, thus
creating a market large enough to attract startups and small enterprises
who will create new innovative services for citizens and businesses in
urban areas. “There is an incredible opportunity for European cities to
take advantage of open solutions and a wide community of developers, to
quickly bring digital services and innovations to their citizens”,
commented Patrice Slupowski, Vice-President of Digital Innovation, Orange.

FIWARE is an open source platform integrating a number of components making
it easier to develop smart applications. It was created through a
Public-Private Partnership between more than 40 organisations and the
European Commission. Now the evolution of FIWARE is extending to other
regions, starting with Latin America, where the same vision and ambition is
shared.



*Belén Kayser*
Social Media & Communications
OgilvyOne Worldwide Madrid
Cell phone: +34 620 63 97 15
Office: +34 91 451 22 04
E-mail: *belen.kayser at ogilvy.com <belen.kayser at ogilvy.com>*
Twitter: @missbkayser <http://twitter.com/missbkayser>



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