Ooredoo Qatar has been confirmed as a Lead Partner in the Smart Cities Council, a leading industry coalition formed to accelerate the transition to smart, sustainable cities. Ooredoo joins global leaders in the smart cities sector who sit on the council, including IBM, Microsoft, MasterCard, and Cisco. As Lead Partner, Ooredoo will have the opportunity to aid the direction of the smart cities in Qatar, the region and across the world by contributing to the Council’s body of knowledge including city tools and resources, mentoring and workshops. More than 10 major cities within Ooredoo’s footprint are classified as “mega-cities” hosting a population of more than ten million. These cities are expected to grow bigger as rural populations move into the urban areas, it added.
Ooredoo's new role follows other initiatives by the group within the smart city space. Last October, its subsidiary, Indosat brought together smart city experts in a major conference on smart technology. The event, “Smart ICT for your Business Success,” saw a keynote presentation by the Mayor of Bandung on the application of smart city technologies in his city, which is the second largest metropolitan area in Indonesia with a sprawling urban population of around 9 million people. During the event, Indosat also launched three smart services: MyApps - an Application Marketplace, WAN Optimizer - to optimize the Wide Area Network (WAN) bandwidth for businesses and its own M2M Platform.
Ooredoo has also signed a strategic alliance with KT Corporation of Korea to introduce new concepts and innovations in the IoT/M2M area.The company is currently implementing a cloud-based Machine to Machine (M2M) platform, which will be rolled out in several countries across its footprint during 2015. The M2M services will be available for businesses, and can also play a key role in implementing smart city technologies.
