The population of Planet Earth is fast approaching 7 billion people.

• 400 cities have populations over 1 million.
• 19 cities in the world have populations of 20 million or more.
• 500 million people will be urbanized in the next 5 years.

Somewhere between 100 and 500 new cities - each with a population of at least 1 million — will be built and inhabited by 2030.

Trillions of dollars will be spent. Tens of millions of people will be employed.
By 2050 more people will live in cities than live on all of Planet Earth today.
It is an enormously complex undertaking.

The numbers are so vast, the timetable so abrupt, that our traditional models and practices can no longer scale to solve the problem.

Technology is an essential part of the solution. It can provide tools to manage the challenge, and it can deliver services on a vast scale with unprecedented efficiency.

As it happens, we are entering the third web age, The Internet of Everything, supported by the Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO).

This evolution has two defining characteristics.

• Any "thing" can be connected to an IP network.
• Every "thing" that is connected will speak to each other.

The convergence of all kinds of data across a unified IP network will make it possible to develop a wide range of new services.

And to deliver these services to anyone, anywhere, anytime.
It is this combination of services and delivery that defines a Smart+Connected Community.

The ultimate vision for a sustainable city is one that is economically resilient. It is culturally and socially vibrant and inclusive. The citizens are active and engaged in their community. And environmental quality is steadily improving. How can Cisco Smart+Connected Communities provide the right solution to the complex problems of cities?

The short answer is that an investment in broadband infrastructure creates jobs, increases competitiveness, and improves social equity. The longer answer is that an investment in an intelligent network provides the means for the government to converge traditionally siloed business processes into a single network. This increases sustainability in two ways: It reduces

Operating Expenditure by doing more with less, and it provides new revenue streamsfrom the services it enables.

Economy - The key to being more competitive is to be more productive. An S+CC implementation provides the means to deliver higher-quality services, and the network to participate in a larger, more efficient market. Business processes such as permitting can be streamlined.

New tools can be created to lessen the cost of compliance. New partners and investors can be paired with local businesses. The result is job creation.

In turn, the availability of good jobs attracts people who are capable of advancing the paradigm.

Environment - There are only two ways to maintain, much less improve, the environment: reduce the amount of resources that are being consumed, or develop clean, renewable supplies of energy. While we wait for the latter, S+CC helps to achieve the former.

There are a wide range of solutions including (but hardly limited to) improved urban design and building standards, increased use of video to minimize travel, improved public transportation, and the ability to monitor and manage the use of all utilities.

Society - The most vibrant and desirable communities are those in which the citizens are fully engaged. S+CC nurtures engagement through a wide range of services, and can be used to create a transparent government process that encourages participation.

The ability to facilitate innovation and to foster collaboration is central to the long-term competitive position of the city.

S+CC is made possible by the Service Delivery Platform (SDP). The platform includes all three Cisco architectural plays:

• Borderless Network Architecture - enables anyone, anything, anywhere, anytime communications.
• Collaboration Architecture - enables access to the broadest range of communication media possible.
• Data Centre Virtualization Architecture - hosts the applications and contributes to sustainability by maximizing the use of physical assets, reducing Capital Expenditure and Operating Expenditure.

These services are delivered through Cloud Computing.

The combination of the Service Delivery Platform and Cloud Computing is what makes S+CC possible.

Community+Exchange is the back office operations "layer" used to manage a Smart+Connected Community.

The Exchange makes it possible to connect people (anyone) and devices (anything) anytime, anywhere so that they can work together. This approach eliminates the traditional individual "stove pipe" control centers in favor of a single connected user environment that facilitates collaboration and improves efficiency.

Six vertical solutions are managed in Community+Exchange. Data from any of these solutions can be used to support Community+Connect and the Drivers.

These six solutions are of particular interest to governments, government agencies and their private partners such as utilities and telecommunications.

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Community+Connect encompasses eight areas of city life. These are inclusive categories because people's activities often cross categories (e.g., school and home).

• Government
• Health
• School
• Office
• Retail
• Home
• Sports & Leisure
• Travel

Connecting the community enables real-time information exchange, facilitates interaction, and provides access to essential resources and expertise.

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Building a smart and connected community requires a combination of specialized partners with a broad range of complementary skills in hardware and control, installation, application development, services and managed services.

Cisco is working continuously to build an ecosystem of best-in-class local and global (MNC) partners to implement S+CC projects around the world.

Each company plays an essential role in the ecosystem "stack." Cisco's play is providing the infrastructure to manage all of the communications — machine-to-person, human-to-human and machine-to-machine — required by a smart and connected community.

When we began talking about the idea, customers got excited. Those discussions made it clear to us that we didn't have a mechanism in place to deliver the complete range of services necessary to maximize the value of our offering.

It became apparent that to take our idea to the next step, we were going to have to build some solutions as a proof-of-concept, then identify the partners who could build on our ideas and create the kinds of solutions our customers wanted.