Florida-based Ubicquia has been awarded Talq certification for its smart city offering that makes intelligent infrastructure deployments easier by ensuring interoperability.

The certification goes to Ubicquia’s UbiVu intelligent asset management platform, with more than 550 users, including some of the largest cities and utilities in the USA. By meeting the Talq Smart City Protocol, Ubicquia ensures its smart city offerings seamlessly communicate and interoperate with other Talq-certified systems.

UbiVu provides lighting management across Ubicquia’s streetlight products including UbiCell, UbiHub and UbiMetro that install in seconds by plugging into the photocell socket of 360 million compatible streetlights. With UbiVu’s Talq certification, Ubicquia’s products can interoperate with third-party lighting management systems.

UbiVu went through rigorous testing for compliance with the Talq specification, which covers a range of aspects including data exchange formats, communication protocols and security measures.

Ron Smith, vice president at Ubicquia, said: “By making our products interoperable, we make it easy for cities to work with multiple vendors and scale their deployments.”

To meet the standard requirements, Ubicquia integrated a Talq-compliant gateway and related APIs into UbiVu. This approach lets it seamlessly integrate with third-party Talq-compliant lighting system controls with Ubicquia’s streetlight platforms. It facilitates a smooth transition for users with legacy mesh lighting management systems to Ubicquia’s LTE platforms. Users can migrate their legacy lighting management platform to UbiVu to take advantage of a single platform for lighting, public safety, traffic management and air quality monitoring.

“It is a pleasure to witness more and more smart city applications worldwide conforming to the Talq standard, thereby offering cities a broad choice of interoperable solutions,” said Simon Dunkley, secretary general of the Talq Consortium. “Furthermore, Ubicquia’s rapid adaption of UbiVu is a perfect example of a fast and smooth implementation of the Talq protocol, highlighting the effort that the consortium has invested in improved documentation and the certification process over the past few years.”

Founded in 2012, the Talq Consortium has established a globally accepted standard for management software interfaces to configure, command, control and monitor heterogeneous outdoor device networks (ODNs). The Talq interface is a software protocol for information exchange, suitable for implementation in various products and systems. This way, interoperability between central management software (CMS) and ODNs, or so-called gateways, for smart city applications from different vendors is enabled, such that a single CMS can control different ODNs in different parts of a city or region.