Arrow Electronics and the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance Launch the Colorado Open Lab

Business Wire 18-Sep-2018 11:15 AM

Showcase and innovation eco-system to fast track development of Smart Cities, Edge Compute and AI

Arrow Electronics, Inc. (NYSE:ARW) has partnered with the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance to launch the Colorado Open Lab, an IoT engineering lab for customer development showcase and innovation collaboration to fast track development of OEM IoT appliances and AI-enhanced applications.

The Colorado Open Lab, which will be located within Arrow's global headquarters in Centennial, Colo., has been backed by the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade and the Denver South Economic Development Partnership.

The Colorado Open Lab comprises engineering facilities with the latest bench, test and edge compute equipment, a customer experience center and a live experience of Smart City showcase consisting of technologies and solutions deployed across the region. Members of the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance can collaborate, discover, innovate, test and confidently validate Smart City solutions prior to deployment within their jurisdictions.

"The pace of growth in Colorado demands that we look at new models of collaboration between our companies, our cities, and our research institutions," said John Tolva, co-founder and chairman of the Colorado Smart Cities Alliance. "The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance, aided by the new Colorado Open Lab, is more than an effort to rethink solutions to urban complexity. It's an effort to remake how we experiment, test, and scale solutions in the first place."

Showcases will cover Smart Street Lighting, Smart Parking, Smart Buildings, environment and resource conservation, energy resilience, infrastructure and asset management, intelligent transportation, connected and automated vehicles, public safety, agriculture, Smart City ICT Infrastructure, security and regional scalability, among others.

"The Colorado Open Lab is the latest extension of a network of open labs that Arrow is launching around the world," said Aiden Mitchell, vice president of IoT global solutions at Arrow. "Our first open lab was in Hong Kong and has seen significant customer collaboration in both consumer and Industrial IoT. The Colorado Open Lab, due to open in the second quarter of 2019, will build on that theme and be an advanced engineering lab for our customers, technology partners and suppliers. The domain expertise in Smart Cities and Smart Counties will advance the deployment of technologies needed to support growth and efficiency within urban society."

"The Colorado Open Lab represents not only an opportunity to leverage leading global technology companies to tackle some of our biggest social issues, but also to redefine public-private partnerships and become a new model for the future of regional and cross-sector collaboration," said Mike Fitzgerald, CEO, Denver South Economic Development Partnership.

About Arrow Electronics

Arrow Electronics guides innovation forward for over 150,000 of the world's leading manufacturers of technology used in homes, business and daily life. With 2017 sales of $26.6 billion, Arrow aggregates electronics and enterprise computing solutions for customers and suppliers in industrial and commercial markets. The company maintains a network of more than 345 locations serving over 80 countries. Learn more at FiveYearsOut.com.

About The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance

The Colorado Smart Cities Alliance is the first and only state-wide alliance of cities, counties and regions within the U.S.A. It is a multi-jurisdictional collaboration of public, private, federal research, academic and business sector leaders committed to accelerating adoption of smart cities projects and initiatives throughout the state. It sets the standard for a new economic model. City and regional members of the Alliance cover 80 percent of Colorado's population accounting for 95 percent of the state's total GDP.

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