Founding President Bernard Têtu suggests that choosing a smart city system does not need to be complicated if municipalities and utilities start by clearly identifying their objectives and the needs of their citizens or clients, weighing both immediate priorities and longer-term plans.
He proposes three main evaluation criteria. The first is core features: remote streetlight control, energy monitoring, performance tracking, adaptive lighting, and maintenance management, along with the ability to connect to other smart city applications such as parking systems and environmental sensors. The second is interoperability and openness, which Têtu says is essential, citing McKinsey Global Institute research that interoperability is required to capture 40 percent of the potential value of IoT applications. He breaks this down into openness in hardware and controls, in network connectivity across protocols like cellular, mesh, and low-power wide-area networks, and in software through open APIs and flexible hosting.
The third criterion is future readiness and scalability, covering considerations such as over-the-air firmware updates, support for emerging technologies, protection against obsolescence, and sufficient bandwidth for applications still to come. Têtu recommends that cities request live demonstrations and build comparison matrices before committing to a vendor.