Wrapping up his three-part series on future readiness, Dimonoff founding president Bernard Têtu turns to software, the layer that ties hardware and network together and ultimately decides how far a smart city system can grow. As cities and regional coalitions increasingly look to share a single platform, that software needs to manage hundreds of thousands of connected devices while still giving each municipality secure, independent administration over its own territory. Têtu illustrates the scale involved: with energy readings polled every fifteen minutes across thousands of street lights, a system needs an architecture built specifically for efficient data traffic, storage and time-series analysis, whether hosted on enterprise cloud infrastructure such as Microsoft Azure or deployed on-premises.
Because the smart city market keeps evolving, software also needs to support applications that do not exist yet. Têtu argues this requires open, secure and well-documented APIs that let departments and vertical markets integrate their own systems, supporting collaboration, efficiency, infrastructure management and public safety goals, along with the flexibility to define new use cases, protocols, rules and filters without custom coding for every scenario.
How easily a system can be updated depends heavily on its deployment model: cloud-based SaaS offers automatic updates, while on-premises deployments require a genuine vendor commitment to continuous improvement and accessible update processes. Security closes out the series, with Têtu calling for encryption at multiple layers, sophisticated authentication methods including two-factor authentication, authentication checkpoints at critical actions, API security held to the same standards as the rest of the platform, and a deliberate effort to minimize the personal data the system stores.