Photo: Marieta-Rivero-Andrus-Ansip-Bruno-Fabre
Four global tech companies join new partnership to boost open source standards
04 March 2015
by Richard Forster
Telefónica, Orange, Engineering and Atos have announced a new partnership during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, to build and support standards for smart cities through the FIWARE Open Source Community.
The new partnership hopes that standard application programming interfaces (APIs) developed in the open source community, combined with standard data models developed by cities and app developers, will ensure portability and interoperability of smart city apps.
According to a joint statement, this will develop smart city apps 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”.
“The smart city market has proven to be a slow process,” revealed Bruno Fabre, Executive Vice-President of Telcos, Media & Utilities, Atos. “The combination of open-source solutions and a new approach for business models will unlock this new opportunity for the Third Digital Revolution.”
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. The FIWARE Open Source Community aims to provide public and royalty-free APIs that ease the development of smart applications.
According to FIWARE, the open nature of the platform allows for multiple providers to 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–helping establish who will provide and operate the environment where applications and/or data will be hosted.
“FIWARE does not just support a more efficient management of municipal services. It brings open standards enabling to transform cities into engines of growth,” explained Marieta Rivero, Chief Deputy Commercial Officer, Telefónica. “Using FIWARE, smart cities can deliver the platform, combining open data and the APIs based on which new innovative applications can be created.”
It is expected that the FIWARE Open Source Community will be fully operational by mid-2015.
