Mr. Vishal Mehra VP iRAM Technologies
“All our applications are cloud ready. We recently launched our Parking Management & guidance system on Platform as a service (PaaS) model. Our Cloud delivered zero Contact Parking solutions can fully transform parking management and operations across the city. It can be easily deployed by Municipal Corporations, Malls, Commercial Buildings, Hospitals, Railway Stations, Schools, Residential Localities, Metro Parking’s etc”
What are the solutions that iRAM Technology offers?
iRam is a product development and technology company with most advanced solutions based on Internet of Things (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 is aligned to government’s vision of cashless payments. Using a mobile application, it allows users the convenience of finding available parking spaces, reserve and pay online.
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 cutouts 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 gases 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 has Covid-19 affected the IoT business 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/future projects is a biggest concern for Young IoT organisations like ours.
How is iRAM working towards adopting cloud services in India to further its growth?
All our applications are cloud ready. We recently launched our Parking Management & guidance system on Platform as a service (PaaS) model. Our Cloud delivered zero Contact Parking solutions can fully transform parking management and operations across the city. It can be easily deployed by Municipal Corporations, Malls, Commercial Buildings, Hospitals, Railway Stations, Schools, Residential Localities, Metro Parking’s etc. without doing away with existing access control hardware or existing layout plans. Zero-Contact parking is powered through an exhaustive cloud delivered Parking Management & Guidance System so parking owners need not invest in new software which will be available on pay as you go basis. This reduces deployment timelines. Back end GUI and commuter mobile application can be customized in no time. The platform providers are going to be hardware (boom barriers, cameras, MPOS, QR Code scanners etc.) agnostic and will either integrate with existing hardware or parking owners can buy an open architecture hardware on their own.
This is time of cloud economics. Efficient data management, low entry barrier, unlimited future upgrades, lower maintenance cost individuals and 4G/5G pervasiveness combined with current new normal’ s of WFH (Work from Home) or WFA (Work from Anywhere) will further accelerate cloud adoption in Corporate and government verticals.
How are smart cities shaping up in lieu of the pandemic?
Cities who invested in smart city technologies like Command control centres and video analytics-based surveillance were equipped to involve these technologies to monitor and control pandemic. Many vital areas like maintaining social distancing, crowd analytics, people counting, no face mask detection were monitored and controlled by real time alarms & notifications to enforcement agencies by various smart cities.
Cities shall be adopting Technology intervention to achieve Zero Contact (Paperless, ticketless, cashless) operations in manyaspects like city vide parking, toll collections, traffic enforcement, smart utilities (energy, water, gas metering) etc.
New age and Smart city Technologies will become all the more important post pandemic era.
What are some of the common barriers to the adoption of technology and digitalisation?
The major barrier to adoption of technology and digitalisation is the resistance to change. Often, citizens who are not aware of the implications of technology are not open to the idea of letting technology revolutionise their world. Since India is a young country, there is still a lot of scope for mass digital revolution in the context of Smart Cities. If we go ask any 20-year old if they wanted to live in an era of rapid technological development, the answer would probably be yes. Another common barrier is the talent gap. There must be more importance on learning of disruptive technological trends, such as use of remote servers and educating children to use basic hi-tech infrastructure, if we want to see a push towards the adoption of technology. Additionally, city administrators have to undertake actionable intelligence out of huge data being generated to justify further adoption and investments in technology in smart cities.
What were the key objectives planned in your roadmap for 2020-21 and how has Covid-19 had an impact on 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.