While the delivery of smart cities solutions requires an overarching plan, they often end up being deployed one project at a time, while focusing on the bigger picture had actually slowed down Cisco in its smart cities push previously, CEO Chuck Robbins has told ZDNet.
"I think it's like any other complex technology architecture; I think you should have some idea of what the end state looks like, but the reality is if you're going to start from there, you'll never do anything," Robbins told ZDNet during Cisco Live 2018 in Orlando.
"I think this is one of the problems we had for many years -- we got caught up trying to do a lot."
Smart cities deployments therefore end up being rolled out one project at a time depending on what the most required use cases for a given city are, he said, such as smart parking, traffic management, smart lighting, and waste management.
According to Robbins, this reality is often at odds with what people have come to expect when a smart city is announced.
"I think there's a misconception that when someone assesses whether there's a smart city or not, people say, 'well, there's not a 100 percent complete architecture across a city that connects everything from traffic lights to water systems, to electrical grids and everything', but the reality is is most customers are taking one, two, three, four use cases that are the most important in that particular region, and actually building against that," Robbins explained.
"People's expectation is that there's going to be a big glowing halo around a city when it becomes smart, and it's going to be obvious to everyone that it's a smart city ... every city's looking at a lot of different things, and we're typically