Microsoft’s CityNext grows 150 percent in first year

Technology company, Microsoft, celebrated the one year anniversary of its global city network, CityNext, this month reporting a total of 200 global partnerships with government, business and citizens.

“We have the largest partner eco-system in the industry, representing hundreds of thousands of global partners that we are ready to tap,” Laura Ipsen, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Worldwide Public Sector, told Cities Today. “We are helping cities realise their vision of a new era of innovation through cloud, big data, mobility and social media.”

CityNext allows people and cities to connect with Microsoft’s products and technologies, education and social programmes, and to its global network of partners which include Accenture, Schneider Electric, Invensys and Atos. The network aims to break down siloes by connecting multiple data sources with the privacy, security and control needed for a city to achieve effective cross-departmental collaboration and resource sharing.

In Mecklenburg County in North Carolina, USA, for example, moving key workloads to the cloud from local data centres for the Food Services Department has not only allowed more work to be done on the go but also allowed the Technical Services team reduce storage costs from US$21 per GB to around US$0.30 per GB.

“Innovative solutions help customers not only do more with less, but also come up with new ways to transform using less resources,” added Ipsen. “I call this ‘new with less’.”