Investment in Smart Cities on the Verge of a $40B Boom
<p>Smart city technology is a $8.1 billion market today but is expected to zoom to almost five times that size in just five years.</p>
As technology has transformed business, so too is it reshaping the built environment and increasingly connecting the people and things in it.
That vision of a completely connected world is catching on, according to a new report from ABI Research. Smart cities technology is an $8.1 billion market today and in five years, expect that market to grow to almost five times that size, reaching $39.5 billion, the report says.
The growth of smart technologies is something that GreenBiz is tracking closely, calling the convergence of smart buildings, vehicles, IT and the grid VERGE.
"Smart city concepts are really taking off globally," said ABI Senior Analyst Josh Flood in a statement announcing the report's release today. "Currently, the largest spending on smart city technologies is for smart grids; however, over the next five years we will see a significant increase on spending for smart transportation technologies such as automatic vehicle ID and smart governance systems such as e-ID and ID document systems."
Around the world, 102 smart city projects are underway with 38 in Europe, 35 in North America, 21 in the Asia-Pacific region, six in the Middle East and Africa and two in Latin America. The ABI Research, which is available for a fee, takes a look at the projects and technology used in them.
Amsterdam, the site of a sweeping smart city project involving Cisco, IBM and Accenture, is among the sites reviewed. GreenBiz wrote about the launch of the project in 2009, when its key participants announced their aim to make Amsterdam the first smart city in the European Union
More recently, Chris Mines, vice president and research director at Forrester Research, described three different types of smart cities and how they are shaped by IT in a GreenBiz post this summer.
Image CC licensed by Flickr user gmmail.