2020 GLOBAL SMART AND SAFE CITY PLATFORM NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION AWARD
City Wise
Octopus’ new brand-agnostic, modular smart city platform, City Wise, is compatible with a myriad of systems and sensors, making it an optimal solution for any city, no matter where they are on their smart city journey. City Wise integrates with PSIM, military, IoT, and security information event management technologies through its open architecture to support more than 350 infrastructure, security, safety, and communications systems, and data sources.
The platform integrates with:
- Resident communications
- Smart parking
- Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition water and power systems
- Traffic and transportation control
- Waste management
- Access control (physical and digital)
- Antivirus
- Drones
- Environmental
- Facial, license plate, and surveillance recognition
- Fire alarms
- Firewalls
- Global Positioning Systems (GPS)
- Information security
- Intrusion alarms
- IoT and smart lighting
- Perimeter intrusion
- Radars
The highly scalable City Wise platform provides real-time information from data-rich streams, such as cameras, weather satellites, gunshot detection, building automation and management systems, human resources, video management, visitor management, and other monitoring and tracking technologies, systems, and sensors. The solution applies Octopus’ revolutionary analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities—e.g., person-of-interest or object detection, identification, and tracking—to enable operators to make sense of the information without conducting extensive research or poring over hours of video footage, sensor readings, news broadcasts, or other data sources. City Wise pieces the data together, enabling clients to focus on running their business. Moreover, the platform supports global information systems, allowing clients to track and monitor employees’ indoor and outdoor locations via two-dimensional and three-dimensional floor plans and geo-maps.
The company’s comprehensive future-proof City Wise platform enables cities to reduce their operational expenditures and carbon footprint while increasing efficiency, safety, and security by decreasing the consumption of utilities and other resources via automated AI capabilities, reducing human error and manpower redundancy. For instance, the company’s solution allows operators to recognize when a resource needs attention or malfunctions— e.g., a light bulb that needs replacement or when a light fixture component fails. Moreover, City Wise provides cities with a cost-effective city management solution equipped with advanced analytics and AI capabilities that enhance resource management and improve city, citizen, and visitor safety and security. Furthermore, City Wise enables operators to send mass notifications to employees, citizens, and visitors. It equips them with a GPSbased panic button that allows first responders to act rapidly and proactively.
In addition to systems’ maintenance needs, City Wise provides a city’s departments and first responders with vital information regarding various events affecting the city—e.g., criminal acts, cyber-attacks, severe weather events, and terrorism—as the solution gathers and makes sense of information across various sensors and systems. Furthermore, Octopus integrates with computer-aided dispatch systems to mobilize the closest first responders (with the proper training) automatically to different emergencies while providing them with pertinent event data—e.g., location (and directions), photos, and incident-specific information. Moreover, City Wise supports operational technology facilities—e.g., water and power utilities—enabling operators to monitor critical national infrastructure and safeguard against cyber and physical attacks.
Impressive Partner Network and Exceptional Customer Support
Octopus partners with world-renowned companies, including Amazon, Avigilon, Bosch, Cisco, FLIR, General Electric, HikVision, Honeywell, IBM, McAfee, Microsoft, Milestone, NICE Public Safety, SensoGuard, Siemens, Suprema, Symantec, Traffilog, and Tyco.
The company’s partnerships enable Octopus to integrate existing and new technologies seamlessly with its solutions. Such strategies allow the company to offer a rapid implementation process, taking only a few weeks to deploy and configure Octopus’ technologies compared to competitors’ standard months-long implementation practices.
Moreover, the solution’s real-time Business Intelligence dashboard prioritizes data. It offers a comprehensive view of a client’s sites, allowing operators to manage their organization’s environment seamlessly through the user-friendly interface.
The company offers two pricing models: Perpetual licensing or software-as-a-service (SaaS). With the licensing option, a customer pays a one-time fee to gain the rights to use the software and for any customization and services, and then pays an annual maintenance fee based on the number of sites where the client utilizes the technology. With Octopus’ SaaS option, clients pay a yearly management fee based on the number of users. Moreover, the company’s technologies comply with national and global industry mandates, including AS9100D, ISO20000-1, ISO20000:2011-9, ISO27001, ISO27017:2015, ISO27018:2016, ISO90003, ISO9001, and the General Data Protection Regulation, allowing clients in any industry globally to utilize Octopus’ solutions. Serving as a testament to the company’s industry-disruptive technology and customer-centric strategies, Octopus’ clients span across 26 countries—including well-known brands, such as Brinks, Coca-Cola, Credit Karma, Electra Security, G4S, Security and Crisis Centre by EJC, and York Regional Police.
Conclusion
As government institutions and municipalities work to address the increasing needs of urban penetration and integrate sustainable, resourceful solutions, the need for a system with a comprehensive, holistic view augmented by advanced analytics capabilities becomes apparent. Conventional siloed systems are managed independently from one another, requiring manual analysis from multiple sources, hindering response times.
Previously recognized as a global leader in the integrated command and control market by Frost & Sullivan in 2016 and 2018, Octopus Systems provides a brand-agnostic, modular smart city platform, called City Wise, which is compatible with more than 350 systems.
Powered by the company’s Command and Control platform, City Wise leverages proprietary advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to offer a single, unified system for enhanced situational awareness, significantly decreasing cities’ costs and carbon footprints while increasing safety and security. Octopus Systems’ wholly cloud-based solution enables cities to avoid rip-and-replace strategies and access their ecosystem’s posture from anywhere in the world.
For its strong overall performance and innovative smart city solutions, Octopus Systems earns Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 Global New Product Innovation Award in the smart and safe city platform industry.
