MARK MIRCHANDANI: There are lots of technologies
and communication that go into building a smart city.
Join us in historic downtown Austin, Texas,
as we talk to SoftServe about using the cloud to make
smarter and safer cities.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So what is a smart city?
RONALD ESPINOSA: That's the question of the year, I think.
So for years, we had the notion of "this
is the year of mobile."
And it feels like now it's "this is the year of the smart city"
for the last couple of years.
And it means something different to everybody.
I like to think of them more in terms
of intelligent environments, as opposed to smart cities,
because for one city, becoming smart
might mean adding lights that can get brighter or dimmer
as lighting outside changes.
It could be having autonomous vehicles.
It could be having technologies and sensors
put in place to help people with disabilities.
Really, what I think it is, is it's
an environment that interacts with the people that are inside
of that environment.
And that's why I tend to drift more
toward an intelligent environment, where
that could be a vehicle.
It could be a campus.
It could be a building.
It could be the space that we have right now.
If we can be in two places at the same time,
physically and virtually, then I think
that's a smart environment.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Have there been any examples
that you can talk about of cities kind of creating
intelligent environments?
RONALD ESPINOSA: Sure.
So in the Carolinas Alliance for Innovation out of Greenville,
South Carolina, we've got more into the connected citizen
in the smart city environment and
first-mile last-mile transportation solves.
And what that is, is what happens when you have five
or six different connected and/or autonomous vehicles--
all different systems--
needing to speak to each other, to the environment,
and traffic control needs to be built?
And what we were able to do was create a multi-modal
transportation, let's call it, viewpoint--
single pane of glass, control tower type of thing--
where we're able to see not only where are the vehicles,
but what's the most efficient mode of transportation,
from a cost standpoint, for the connected citizen
to get from point A to point B?
And also, what's the most efficient routing
for emergency services vehicles and what-have-you?
Essentially, we're starting to solve the big problem
that the public sector has with digital technologies,
which is interoperability.
So how does one system talk to another?
How do they bi-directionally inform each other?
And we've been able to do all of that in GCP.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: And a lot of that
is based on, like you just mentioned,
getting a lot of data, being able to collect it.
What does all that technology look like, especially when
it comes to Google Cloud?
RONALD ESPINOSA: When you have just massive amounts of data
coming in and, really, new sources of data
that maybe you hadn't contemplated before,
it creates piles and piles and piles of code to go through
and data files to go through.
And the simple fact is, is that what used to take years to do,
can now be done in minutes with BigQuery.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So a great example
of what this might look like is collecting
from a whole bunch of sensors, which is largely IoT.
But like you said, that could be a tire.
That could be cars.
That could be traffic lights.
That could be anything.
Collecting all that data, transforming it,
and making those data decisions, especially the legal ones about
who owns which data, who gets visibility into it--
making sure it all kind of can play nicely together
by aggregating it, and then ultimately doing analysis
on it.
RONALD ESPINOSA: Yeah, I think so.
And really, I think the key term here is "enablement" or even
"empowerment."
It's the idea that technology took off at some point.
And the government was focused on other things.
And now technology-- that whole internet thing-- yeah,
it's not a thing.
It's here.
It's not going away.
And so now the government's in a position where they say, well,
how do we manage it?
How do we tap into it?
And I think what's happening is, Pandora's box has been opened
and saying, OK, well, now it's opened.
Wow, we didn't know all of this was here.
And as they implement solutions, like smart lighting,
like smart cars, and the connected citizen
becomes more and more pervasive, well, now
what do we do with all this?
How do we manage it?
And then as they drill into it, they
find out that this is almost bottomless.
And we have to have something that scales long-term.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Now, there's a platform
that SoftServe offers that kind of looks
at all of these aspects.
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
RONALD ESPINOSA: So we call it the intelligent municipality
platform.
And essentially, what that is, is it's
a data store built on GCP that allows for collection
from myriad points of data, export and connections
to any destination so that we can enable
the public-private partnership to work together and create
a digital ecosystem that sits on top of this.
So we start out with the basics of,
where is the data coming from?
How many different systems do we have?
How do we put them in play to work with each other?
And then from there, we now start to say, OK,
what are the benefits?
Well, what if we can distill things like amber and silver
alerts and get them to the city corner,
as opposed to the entire zip code when a message goes out?
So that's a public service benefit.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of this
wouldn't have been possible without some
of the advancements in the cloud, especially recently.
RONALD ESPINOSA: I think 100% impossible.
Where would you ever put enough computing power
to make it happen?
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So both because of scale and because
of the technologies being offered,
but also some of the new--
like you mentioned earlier about BigQuery
and being able to quickly analyze huge amounts of data
very rapidly--
all of these things have kind of enabled people
to ask, how can I improve?
Where can I use this data?
And how can I analyze it?
RONALD ESPINOSA: I think so.
I also think that the ease of use, ease of access,
and, in a way--
and I'll use this term abstractly--
a bit of standards.
There is a certain understanding of what the Google Cloud
Platform is.
Use these tools to do these things.
And you can have people coming out of school,
ready to jump in and adopt this.
Well, that takes a lot of the fear out of it
for a public sector entity, and really for anyone.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Well, thanks so much for coming in, Ron,
and telling us about how SoftServe helps enable
companies, including the public sector,
to really understand and do more with their data.
RONALD ESPINOSA: Sure, I appreciate the opportunity.
Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Thanks for joining us,
and stay tuned for more customer interviews on Stack Chat.