“The city is built from the ground up with the fabric of using technology,” reports Roger Cheng in the Wall Street Journal Today about Cisco’s efforts in Incheon, Korea.  It was also reported in Fast Company back in May However, beyond enabling cities with Cisco branded gear, Flip Video Cameras, On-Line meeting via Web Ex, networking and storage:

“the project is Cisco’s most ambitious push to get into the business of building ‘smart cities’ a market that the company expects could be worth over $12 billion in three years.’   ‘The core concept is of a connected city with a very big data center, which is the brains of the city,’ said T.Y. Lau, an analyst at research firm Canalysis.

Both articles paint the Smart City concept in broad strokes and even looking at a white paper/strategy doc from Cisco themselves provides no more insight than “Cisco’s Cool! and so are Smart Cities.” In fact,  the paper itself begs the question, who the hell is in charge of the Cisco Marketing and/or Corporate Communication department.   Ummn, I’m the mayor of a city and your telling me that, ‘Convergence acts as a disrupting agent for traditional site and building designs, uses, and operations, helping transform physical space into service offerings.’ Like sign me up.

Sadly, though, I get it and I’ve mentioned it before, the building is the operating system and when you have it digitally there is an abundance of ways you can make it run smarter, more efficiently, greener and save you money.  For example, motion sensors can determine the relative population of any one floor, room, etc, turning on/off lights adjusting HVAC loads in real time. Or determining at any one time that only 60% of your employees are in the office, allowing you reduce the square footage you lease, however your flexible ‘smart’ work space allows an employee anywhere to sit down and have their desktop, files, phone extension, etc. ported to whatever cubicle, workstation, desk, nook and cranny they happen to be in at the moment.  Okay, that’s cool, so say that.

In 2009 this article in Green Biz showed them mostly in their wheelhouse and partnering with IBM.

But what is most interesting to me is that in the same paper, while amusing in techno/biz jargon, has effectively the same building life cycle chart that any purveyor of software to the AECOM community is well aware of, so Cisco is ready to be your partner through Design to Demolition.  How is Cisco going to be your partner, as a vendor who wants you to spec their products into your design like a window assembly?  As a software partner?  Services partner? How far are they reaching into the $4 trillion dollar construction industry and the world’s biggest asset class, buildings?  They got the pockets and have never been afraid to buy instead of make.

Cisco® Smart+Connected Real Estate solutions converge building, safety, and communications networks onto the open Internet Protocol (IP) standard, streamlining processes by providing a single connection for building management and IT systems. Convergence acts as a disrupting agent for traditional site and building designs, uses, and operations, helping transform physical space into service offerings. The network forms the foundation for an intelligent building infrastructure that adds value to every kind of real estate project.

Cisco Smart+Connected Real Estate benefits all stakeholders in the design, construction, and real estate industries as well as those using the final built environment. The network becomes an “intelligent platform” infrastructure that creates an unprecedented opportunity for improved services, enhanced processes, and cost-effective operations for everyone who uses or creates real estate.