TELEFONICA, ORANGE, ENGINEERING and ATOS join forces to push common standards for Smart Cities based on the FIWARE platform

TELEFONICA, ORANGE, ENGINEERING and ATOS join forces to push common standards for Smart Cities based on the FIWARE platform

The companies commit to deliver commercial offerings and provide their support to the establishment of an open source community around FIWARE.

Simple, Open, Free and standardized: enabling the new future for Smart Cities services.

Barcelona, March 3^rd 2015. Telefónica, Orange, Engineering and Atos have decided to join forces and announce that they will take the initiative towards creation of the FIWARE Open Source Community to foster and support the evolution of standards for Smart Cities and their spread worldwide. It is expected that the FIWARE Open Source Community will be fully operational at the end of Q2-2015.

With the enormous growth in the number of smartphones, daily life has become digital but in cities remains very similar to how it looked like 15 or 20 years ago. The integration of Internet of Things, Cloud and BigData technologies, together with the support of Open Data policies, will create the conditions for a new period of intense transformation of cities into smart cities. For Bruno Fabre, Executive Vice-President of Telcos, Media & Utilities in Atos, "the Smart City market has proven to be a slow process. The combination of open-source solutions and a new approach for business models will unlock this new opportunity for the Third Digital Revolution".

However, the concept of "Smart City" is also under (r)evolution, since it will not just be focused on providing more efficient services, but transforming cities into digital platforms enabling the development of innovative citizen services open to all, bringing the fuel for a new economical boost, fostering growth and the creation of new jobs.  The four companies strongly believe that FIWARE will be instrumental in materializing this vision. "FIWARE does not just support a more efficient management of municipal services. It brings open standards enabling to transform cities into engines of growth", explains Marieta Rivero, Chief Deputy Commercial Officer at Telefónica. "Using FIWARE, Smart Cities can deliver the platform, combining Open Data and the APIs based on which new innovative applications can be created", she explained.