Smart Solutions From iRam to Make Cities Smarter

Udaya Bhaskar Rao Abburu, CEO, iRAM Technologies offers a host of IoT based smart solutions for smart cities but COVID19 has put a spanner on the works

What are the solutions and services in the iRam portfolio?

iRam is a product development and technology company with most advanced solutions based on IoT. The products and solutions from iRam are specially designed to make urban living more convenient, aligned with the government’s Smart City initiative. iRam’s solutions are home grown, developed in their manufacturing facility in Bangalore. Some products and solutions from iRam’s stable are:

Smart Parking System

iRam provides Smart Parking Solutions for on-street, off-street and covered parking spaces. The Smart Parking System efficiently optimizes the usage of the available parking space, enhancing the functioning of streets in the city. The system also ensures appropriate parking fees, avoiding payment pilferages through digital payments and aligning to government’s vision of cashless payments. Using a mobile application, it allows users a great convenience to find available parking spaces, reserve and pay online. iRAM has recently introduced Zero Contact Ticketless, Paperless, and cashless Parking solutions in view of public safety and health.

Smart Poles

Designed from ground up in India for Indian roads and climate conditions, iRam Smart Poles are highly secure that prevents and alerts thefts. The Pole has flexible networking and powering options for equipment and an automatic temperature management within the enclosure. The enclosure can be placed either on the ground or under the ground. Smart Poles offer multiple cut-outs for 3rd party equipment’s to be hosted ranging from Hidden telecom antenna’s, cameras, variable messaging boards, smart street lighting, environment sensor systems, electronic call box, PA systems, Wi-fi access points etc.

Smart Lighting

iRam’s Smart Street Lights are remote controlled and based on secure wireless connectivity. The system can be retrofitted and requires no rewiring. Smart Lighting offers pervasive User Control from anywhere using any-device with a standard web-browser and mobile App. The system supports Motion Detection and Ambient Light Detection and can be located on various map sources including Google maps with hierarchical browsing.

Smart Environment Solutions

Smart Environment Sensors sample the environment at configurable intervals to display the live sensor data on a local/remote display units. These low maintenance sensors are used to sense polluting gas besides temperature, humidity, noise levels, ambient light levels, dust in air etc. The sensors can also be configured to send alerts and notifications to the registered users.

Customized Solutions

iRam solutions are designed on open platform IoT architecture that offer the advantage of designing customized solutions addressing the varied requirements of the customers. As open architecture has the inherent capability to extract data and control and monitor the same from different kinds of field devices it can have varied applications. iRam is already working on customized requirements for industrial automation, telecom tower management, precision farming etc.

How are iRam’s smart technology solutions used in Smart Cities?

iRam’s solutions are integrated with leading smart city command control platforms. We have successfully deployed solutions in various smart city projects and municipal corporations across India. iRam is known for indigenous technology and entire solution from Field devices, sensors, controllers, gateways, central management software, user mobile app and POS app etc. is designed and developed by iRam. We have deployed these solutions in Bhubaneshwar, Kanpur, Pimpri Chinchwad, Rajkot, Kohima, Dahod and others.

What is the story behind iRam’s genesis and its expansion?

Core strength of iRAM is establishing IoT architecture wireless technologies. iRAM stands for innovative radio access module. Our timely entry into smart cities defines our growth story. Backed by our IoT &wireless technology strength’s we started developing smart city specific use cases for communication between field sensors/gateways and central servers. Extracting real-time and accurate field data for smart city applications is one of the most critical and onerous tasks for smart cities. Our strength focus and delivery towards this task helped us to add more and more smart cities to our network.

Which are the smart city projects you are involved with?

iRAM is part of larger ecosystem in deploying smart parking, smart street lighting, environment monitoring and smart poles in various smart cities like Bhubaneshwar, Dahod, Rajkot, Kanpur, PCMC, Kohima and others.

What is your GTM strategy and what sort of implementation partner ecosystem you follow?

iRAM believes in high touch customer engagement while sourcing and fulfilment model is MSI channel and Value-added Distribution network driven.

How are your solutions leveraging IoT sensors?

Our solution involves field data extraction through a network of IoT sensors. Some of the use cases are bay occupancy sensing through magnetic sensors in smart parking, Air quality sensing through gas sensors for environment monitoring etc.

What are your expansion plans both in terms of market and solutions?

iRAM is a product development and technology company. The Company will be further investing into engineering manpower expansion for new Technology and Product developments. We are confident to add more and more Indian smart cities to our network. As a logical progression we are working on various International Smart city projects as well. Additionally, we are expanding into new verticals and geographies with our eParke RealParking Platform as a service model. We believe in innovation at smart cities shall be replicated to Parking space owners like Malls etc. for citizen conveniences by removing entry barriers through Cloud based service models.

What has been the business and economic impact of COVID19 on your business and the overall sector?

While we are highly positive of faster recovery phase, but reality is Q1 & Q2 is a wash out. Covid has impacted supply chain. Field deployment activities paused for time being. Payment realisation has become a big concern in the industry and no visibility over closure of new and future projects is a biggest concern for a young organisation like ours.

What about the impact on your manufacturing facility? What are the initiatives for safety of your own employees?

We are maintaining various social distancing norms and safety guidelines in office environment. Employees are free to WFH and attend office only in unavoidable situations.

What are the technology and business trends in this sector?

New Technologies like IoT, AI, Machine Learning, Big data analytics, Robotics, Blockchain, Drones etc. are latest industry trends. Their applications are multifold. It is all about seamless & faster adoption now which will define real and measurable benefits to various stakeholders esp. end users like citizens or government. E.g Indian smart cities are much ahead and already deploying IoT based Smart Sensor Networks for various applications like Solid waste management, smart parking, smart street lighting, environment monitoring, Water distribution etc. However, adoption of most of these applications will be driven by bringing actionable intelligence into practise by Urban administrators.

What are the key initiatives planned in your roadmap for next 12-18 months and how has COVID19 affected it?

We have been somewhat fortunate in this aspect. We had various video analytics & cloud delivered Parking use cases in our mid-term roadmap planning. With current unprecedented times, Zero Contact (Ticketless, paperless, cashless) parking became a new normal. This market opportunity led us into faster development cycle & GA of our Video analytics &cloud offerings for new customer segment like Malls, shopping complexes and commercials buildings etc.