Cisco sets up India Advisory Board to address Digital India opportunities

Cisco has announced a Cisco India Advisory Board comprising five industry leaders to advise the India leadership team on strategic matters and help the company tap new business opportunities in Digital India.

The India Advisory Board will comprise Shobana Kamineni, Executive Vice Chairman, Apollo Hospitals; Rajiv Kumar, Former Director General of Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI); GK Pillai, Former Home Secretary, Commerce Secretary, Government of India; Kiran Karnik, Former President, NASSCOM; and R Seshasayee, Executive Vice Chairman, Ashok Leyland. Anil Menon, President, Smart+Connected Communities and Deputy Chief Globalisation Officer, Cisco will serve as the chairman of the India Advisory Board. The India Advisory Board will offer Cisco executives counsel on future investments for country transformation and guide the company in addressing customer business priorities.

Cisco announced a series of initiatives in 2014 and ‘IoT Innovation Hub’ in Bengaluru’ is one of them. The network infrastructure of the ‘IoT Innovation Hub’ set up in Bengaluru in association with the Electronic City Industrial Association (ELCIA) is ready and Electronic System Design & Manufacturing (ESDM) companies including many start-ups have begun development and testing and production of electronic product prototypes for an IoT enabled smart city environment.

Cisco in association with ELCIA is providing the infrastructure and expertise required to develop IoE solutions and products like smart lighting, environmental sensing, video analytics based safety and surveillance system, license plate recognition, no- parking violation and wrong lane detection among others.

The project is being undertaken as part of the Cisco Smart+Connected Communities concept that places technology at the heart of economic development and better quality of life in modern cities. The focus is on using the network to deploy digitally enabled transportation, healthcare, education, utilities, energy grid and real estate in a digitized India. The project will help further the government’s ‘Make in India’ vision by allowing local manufacturers to design innovative solutions to address domestic demand for electronic hardware and save precious foreign exchange for India.

Cisco also informed that additional 100 remote FIR kiosks will be deployed in Bengaluru. Encouraged by the positive feedback on the pilot installation of the remote FIR Kiosk at Malleshwaram, the Bengaluru city police has announced that they intend to deploy 100 more kiosks in the city. Installed in November last year, the FIR Kiosk allows citizens to remotely file a police complaint or lodge an FIR without having to go to a police station irrespective of the jurisdiction where the incident has occurred.

The ATM-like kiosks will be equipped with a Cisco TelePresence system with high-definition video and high-quality audio; a touch screen, virtual keyboard and Cisco collaboration technology, to allow citizens to register a complaint by launching a live collaboration session with a designated police officer in the city.

The success enjoyed by this Remote Expert Government Service (REGS) solution will pave the way for similar public-private partnerships to make next generation citizen services available in India. REGS, a part of the Cisco’s Smart+Connected Communities portfolio offers a new way for Government services to be delivered and how citizens interact with various Government departments and officials, in a truly immersive, collaborative experience.

Cisco has developed a training module on smart cities for the Ministry of Urban Development, Government of India. The module has four segments that cover everything from the basics of smart cities, emerging trends and challenges in the segment to the role of technology in smart cities and how advanced, secure networks can help lay the foundation to connect city infrastructure, citizens and businesses. It offers a comprehensive guide to officers, bureaucrats and other stakeholders in the ministry as they action out government’s 100 smart cities vision. The training sessions have been created in the form of high quality videos which will be hosted by Cisco and made available to the ministry in March 2015.