


Founded in 2011, the company works toward eliminating complexities faced during development of Smart City solutions. “Today’s vendors and government CIOs are confronted with adversities while applying a broad and top-down approach in their smart city planning,” explains Lazard. “This approach culminates in the form of technical complexity, organizational intricacies, and heavy expenses that can leave smart city innovation languishing on the drawing board.” Sidestepping some of these roadblocks, OpenDataSoft provides a turnkey SaaS platform that enables easy transformation of data into apps and innovative services. The platform serves as an open data portal and a smart city data hub that helps the government, citizens, and start-ups explore, visualize, share, and innovate ways to use data. “Our solution was created keeping in mind the heightened focus on IoT, open data, and smart city strategies that require ultra-simple access to all useful data,” asserts Lazard.
The OpenDataSoft Smart Cities platform handles large-scale, real-time data from IoT-enabled objects and infrastructure that play a pivotal role in smart city transformation. Apart from data management, the solution instantly transforms the datasets into easy-to-understand interactive data visualizations consisting of tables, graphs, charts, maps, and pictures. Furthermore, the platform’s API-centric design, featuring automatic generation of RESTful APIs, straightforward API customization, Swagger integration and a metering and payment option that monetizes data published via these APIs, adds to its customer friendliness.
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Our solution has been created keeping in mind the heightened focus on IoT, open data, and smart city strategies that requires ultra-simple access to all useful data
Armed with such dexterity, the platform also offers granular security that is ideal for both private and public data sharing. “Besides smart city and government arenas, our platform is also capitalized by various other businesses for internal data sharing, open innovation, and B2B services,” expresses Lazard.
Reflecting on one of the instances, the city of Paris, which has a deep commitment to open data and open government, and an equally strong vision for smart city development, capitalized on OpenDataSoft’s open data portal and smart city data hub to gain new ease in sharing, exploring, and reusing their data. The platform also enabled the client to build close collaboration with their ecosystem partners in transportation, utilities, and energy. “Our solution best suited the needs of client, given the ease with which their partners could participate, attain robust generation of APIs, and flexible security,” extols Lazard.
In the pursuit of building superior offerings, OpenDataSoft envisions hosting a global open data platform where any organization can share and publish data—analogous to YouTube. “We’ve seen the way data producers and re-users connect to form a community around our customers’ portals,” quotes Lazard. “Delivering a similar experience on an international scale will prove productive for numerous communities around the globe.” Alongside cultivating such innovative ideas, the company aims to expand their global footprint in the U.S. to ensure relentless progression in the landscape of Smart City solutions.
Company
OpenDataSoft
Headquarters
Chapel Hill, NC
Management
Jean-Marc Lazard, CEO
Description
A provider of a cloud-based turnkey platform that enables easy transformation of data into apps and innovative services
