As announced by the Vietnam Software and IT Services Association (VINASA) last week, Danang will be handed the Vietnam Smart City Award 2023, along with three other thematic awards: Smart Operations and Management City for Infrastructure and Public Service; Smart, Green Environmental Management City; and Attractive City for Startups and Innovation.

The awards ceremony will take place on November 30 in Hanoi.

Initially launched by VINASA in 2020, the Vietnam Smart City Award honours urban areas, organisations, and businesses that have contributed to helping cities become smarter and more liveable, have a compelling brand, and can be competitive and develop sustainably.

The award also encourages businesses to create innovative products and technology solutions; acting as a channel connecting supply and demand, and collaborating to build appropriate models to accelerate smart city development across Vietnam.

Smart city accolades pour in for Danang

Danang has been focused in recent years to form a shared infrastructure, platform, and database for smart city applications. In addition to urban network infrastructure covering 450km and serving over 190 agencies, the city is launching a data centre expansion project with a budget approximating $2.9 million.

In particular, it will add 13 servers with about 130TB of storage. After completion, the data centre will encompass 200 servers, with storage capacity approximating 300TB.

At the same time, the city is expediting a project to expand the local online television system with a budget reaching $845,000, encompassing the provision of terminal equipment to all wards and communes, agencies and organisations.

Also this year, the city has made efforts to deploy and update more shared platform features such as parking monitoring, vessel monitoring, the Open Data portal platform, and the Danang Smart City multi-service mobile application, among others.

Thong Le Anh Tuan, CEO of social commerce platform Selly, said that businesses have received a lot of support for development from the city through training sessions, workshops, and seminars to improve their qualifications, technological capacity, and information security, so that they can remove obstacles and meet requirements during the digital transformation process.

“Businesses expect Danang to scale up domestic and international cooperation by attracting more resources, expertise, technology, and solutions from organisations, businesses, and experts to smooth implementation of smart city projects, along with introducing additional policies to uphold startups and smaller enterprises,” Tuan said.

Nguyen Trong Tin, general director of Onemore Communications and Technology, commented that the city has made swift steps into building a smart city model. However, for businesses in the Danang, barriers still persist in implementing digital transformation along with a weak high-tech workforce.

“The city needs policies and incentives to attract high-quality human resources; policies that support businesses in the process of training, coaching, capacity and skill enhancement through using smart programmes and devices; and further paying attention and strengthening connection to the national population database,” Tin proposed.

According to Tran Hanh Trang, vice president of the Danang Software Business Association and director of Enouvo IT Development, many applications have been deployed by the city in recent times, such as measuring rainfall and flood levels on the Danang Smart City app, or the My Portal digital citizen platform.

“Danang needs to strengthen cooperation with other smart cities such as those in Japan and South Korea. They already have investors in Danang, thereby learning from experience to apply successful and feasible models here,” Trang said.

Furthermore, Danang also needs to devote more resources to support startups in IT, thereby both developing the city’s innovative startup ecosystem and taking advantage of local resources, Trang added.

Tran Ngoc Thach, deputy director of Danang Department of Information and Communications, said that Danang winning the Smart City Award four times in a row comes by virtue of positive contributions and consensus from authorities at all levels as well as community digital tech groups who directly guide people to create and use online public services, bringing tech closer to all.

“In the forthcoming time, the department will continue to coordinate with relevant units to promote the efficiency of operating centres as well as data centres, speeding up tech infrastructure progress, and more effectively avail of digital data and technology to heighten the quality of service provision for individuals and businesses,” Thach said.