The town of Cary in North Carolina is deploying LoRa technology from SAS and Semtech using Microsoft Azure to improve its community services.

By leveraging LoRaWan connectivity and data analytics from SAS, the town will be able to monitor floods and provide additional community services to its citizens.

Cary, SAS Institute and Semtech are together building a centre of excellence focused on technology that will positively impact the lives of Cary’s citizens. Through the collaboration, the town and two companies will facilitate the development and deployment of edge-to-cloud IoT technology, solve real world problems and make Cary the benchmark for other municipalities to replicate.

A previous SAS and Cary IoT collaboration to address stormwater flood alerting has already received multiple smart city innovation awards. According to the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF), most US coastal areas will likely be threatened by 30 or more flooding days each year. With more floods happening each year and factors influencing climate change, technology can help mitigate and solve these environmental problems.

“This partnership represents an exciting new chapter in our IoT journey,” said Nicole Raimundo, chief information officer for Cary. “We see so much potential for community-focused solutions in this collaboration with Semtech and SAS. We believe that IoT technology has amazing potential to streamline services, making us more agile and responsive. It will help us continue to meet citizen needs in surprising new ways, and we’re honoured by these companies’ commitment to improving lives through innovation in the government space.”

IoT technology powered by SAS, built on Microsoft Azure, provides real-time insights into data and analytics generated across multiple use cases that help solve specific problems and offer an interconnected world with better ways to monitor and safeguard communities, people and resources.

“IoT is forcing a fundamental shift of business and operational strategies as organisations adopt new models for agile IT, edge analytics and platform-based security,” said Jason Mann, vice president of IoT at SAS. “The town of Cary adopting SAS and Semtech solutions will expand their current services while building a digital infrastructure to better meet the needs of their citizens.”

The end-to-end technology, incorporating LoRaWan connectivity with the SAS IoT analytics platform, should simplify the development of IoT services that are focused on solving some of the biggest problems facing the world today, including natural disasters, hunger and sustainability.

“The centre of excellence will be a leading example of how cities and towns in the USA can leverage IoT data and analytics for a smarter, safer planet,” said Alistair Fulton, vice president at Semtech. “In addition, deploying IoT will create better community services for their residents.”