The City of Opelika, Alabama, has quickly become one of the smartest small cities in America. What caused this small town, with just over 30,000 people, to be transformed into a smart computing powerhouse?
Bath bubbles.
As part of a long-standing tradition, high school students frequently pranked the city fountain by adding bubble solution which caused an immense amount of damage to major city equipment including water pumps. The damages resulted in hundreds of man-hours wasted and tens of thousands of dollars spent on replacing pumps, cleaning, and draining the fountain each time.
In 2017, city officials approached their Chief Information Officer (CIO) Dr. Stephen Dawe to fix the problem. They wanted to detect and prevent these acts of vandalism in real-time.
The challenge was not only to protect the fountain but also to integrate this solution seamlessly with the city’s existing infrastructure and budget constraints. This led Dr. Dawe to discover Vantiq, a real-time event-driven intelligent platform that promised the integration capabilities
for Opelika to sense, analyze and act immediately.
