“Smart Cities’ is the new buzzword in the Indian infrastructure and development space. A smart city is one that completely runs on technology—be it water, electricity, sanitation and recycling, thus ensuring round the clock water supply, traffic management and efficient transport systems. These systems employ data analytics to provide efficient solutions to ease commuting and automate every aspect thus requiring minimal human intervention.
Cities are built on the three pillars of Infrastructure, Operations and People. In a Smart City, not only is each one of these pillars infused with intelligence, but more importantly these pillars interconnected with each other to provide us with uninterrupted solutions.

Many established brands such as GE, 3M, Cisco, Honeywell, IBM etc. have already started their projects in smart cities and many startups are entering in this huge market. These companies can target a particular space and can capitalize over the opportunity in a short time frame as the market is in its nascent stage.

Smart Cities – An Ocean of Opportunities:
The market for smart cities in India over the next 5 years will be around $45-$50 billion

However, this estimate just covers four key focus areas namely, smart energy, smart water management, smart transportation and smart waste management. If we consider the entire opportunity segment, the market sizing will be comparatively higher than the given figure.

For example, considering smart homes and smart buildings will together account for a huge market segment within the smart cities market and there are many markets which we can consider such as smart health, smart security, telecommunications etc.

Secondly, if we analyze the links that connect the major segments of the smart cities, we will get an entirely new opportunity segment. These segments include Cyber security (fraud analytics), Traffic and Weather Apps (Prediction models), Biometrics Analytics (Facial Recognition/ Iris), City Planning and many more.

Thirdly through automation, technology is playing an important role when it comes to automating each and every process related to our routine. Ultimately, automation will become an important part of the smart city market.

The established brands should frame their go-to-market strategy, product strategy, and targeted geographic reach after a careful analysis of the smart city market. Companies like IBM and Cisco are some of the top suppliers in the global smart city market. They are ranked the highest in terms of strategy and execution.
However, there are also huge opportunities for startups to venture into this unexplored space. As long as startups know their unique value proposition, market segments and sustainability strategy, there is a hidden opportunity even in the smallest corner of this huge Ocean.

Cities in the past were built along the river banks. Now they are built along the highways and in near future cities will be built depending upon the availability of the optical fiber networks and smart infrastructure thus providing endless opportunities to all the market players.

This Blog is written by Lekha Gyanchandan. You can reach her lekha@dartconsulting.co.in