Smart City Spotlight: Dallas
There are a few things that come to most people’s minds when they think of Dallas. Cowboys. Oil money. Barbeque. But the city is also a hotbed of innovation, technology and startups. It’s where tech giants like Texas Instruments and AT&T are headquartered.
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There are a few things that come to most people’s minds when they think of Dallas. Cowboys. Oil money. Barbeque. But the city is also a hotbed of innovation, technology and startups. It’s where tech giants like Texas Instruments and AT&T are headquartered. The home of Marc Cuban of "Shark Tank" fame (and owner of the Dallas Mavericks), it has a vibrant and robust startup scene. Plenty of VC firms and incubators lay claim to Dallas, and The Atlantic will include it in its City Makers series this year.
A new organization hopes that soon, Dallas will also be known as one of the nation’s leading smart cities. The Dallas Innovation Alliance (DIA) is a coalition of stakeholders from both the public and private spheres whose goal is to position the country’s fourth-largest metropolitan area as a leader in smart cities modernization.
The VAR Guy sat down with Jennifer Sanders, DIA’s executive director, to hear why Dallas is poised to be the country’s leading smart city, and why that initiative is creating new channel opportunities in the Lone Star State.
Echoing many other leaders in IoT, Sanders says the exciting thing about smart cities is that the tech is already here, waiting for creative people to find new applications that can improve people’s lives. “It’s really not that the technology is new. The function has been around for a long time. It’s the application for smart cities that’s new.” The DIA is committed to involving Dallas’s exploding startup scene and leveraging emerging technologies. Within the coalition, larger corporations can get a firsthand look at emerging tech, and startups have ready access to tech giants looking to invest early in smart city solutions.
Sanders says this is part of what makes smart cities such a great opportunity for the channel. The DIA sees solutions from various industries such as fleet management, commercial real estate and business intelligence with an excellent proof of concept and long-term viability easily expanding into the smart city and public sector verticals. Resellers and service providers in existing spaces are already familiar with the technology. It’s just a matter of rethinking its deployment.
Dallas is among the cities experiencing a wave of urbanization as waves of suburban dwellers and millennials migrate to the urban core. “There’s just this increased density, and increased strain on resources and infrastructure,” says Sanders. “That trend of urbanization is just going to build.” The city can invest in smart technology now, or it can scramble to play catch up once that strain begins to really show.
“Do we wait until it’s a need to have, as opposed to a nice to have? Dallas has always been a city founded by pioneers and trailblazers. This is an emerging space, and this is an opportunity to lead.”
“It was really important to take a multi-phased approach to make sure we’re getting proof of concept in a smaller pilot zone or a living lab before we roll things out across the city,” says Sanders. The DIA felt like there were many elements that made downtown’s West End neighborhood a perfect test case, including the heavy presence of mass transit.
"The West End Station is the most highly trafficked DART rail station on the line. The one way that we know we can impact the whole city in the first phase is through mass transit because whatever we partner with DART to implement is going to affect ridership across the city."
Despite the excellent transit system, Dallas is still very much a driving city, and the inability to find decent parking in downtown is consistently touted as a reason residents don’t visit more. The DIA says it isn’t about a lack of parking, but rather an inability to actually find where to park.
“Studies have shown that there absolutely is enough parking, but people come downtown, they don’t know where parking is and they’re circling the same block six times trying to find a parking space,” Sanders says. Not only is this detrimental to the citizen experience, but the aggregate pollution from cars just circling around the area hoping to snag a spot has a significant carbon footprint.
“If we can create smart parking that would allow people to locate the best parking lot or parking space ahead of time and know exactly where they’re going, it helps on a lot of fronts.”
“We felt like the public-private partnership was the way to go in terms of having all the various stakeholders in the room. It provides some flexibility in operations.”
Getting buy-in from both corporations and public/nonprofit organizations is key to gathering the most cutting edge smart city solutions available, says Sanders. In the four months it has been active, the DIA has landed 13 charter members, including AT&T, IBM, Microsoft, Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) and the city of Dallas – all of which have robust communities of channel partners.
In December of last year, Dallas was one of 10 cities selected to participate in Envision America, a White House-backed initiative that brings city leaders, smart cities experts and corporate partners together to facilitate smart city project planning and implementation in the country’s most forward-thinking metropolises.
The program builds upon the work of Envision Charlotte, which began its smart cities initiative in 2011 with a goal of reducing energy use by 20 percent over five years. Envision America hopes to help other cities leverage its successes and lessons learned in order to streamline the transition from dumb to smart cities.
In December of last year, Dallas was one of 10 cities selected to participate in Envision America, a White House-backed initiative that brings city leaders, smart cities experts and corporate partners together to facilitate smart city project planning and implementation in the country’s most forward-thinking metropolises.
The program builds upon the work of Envision Charlotte, which began its smart cities initiative in 2011 with a goal of reducing energy use by 20 percent over five years. Envision America hopes to help other cities leverage its successes and lessons learned in order to streamline the transition from dumb to smart cities.
There are a few things that come to most people’s minds when they think of Dallas. Cowboys. Oil money. Barbeque. But the city is also a hotbed of innovation, technology and startups. It’s where tech giants like Texas Instruments and AT&T are headquartered.
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