Case Study: City of Barcelona achieves smarter, more efficient citizen services with Microsoft Azure

Barcelona Realizes Vision of Innovative City Governance with Cloud, Devices, and Apps

The City of Barcelona set out to reinvent municipal governance by modernizing its IT infrastructure to deliver faster, more transparent citizen services, enable mobile access, manage growing public data, and reduce costs. The challenge was to deploy scalable, secure systems that supported field workers, frontline services (police and firefighters), big-data analytics for events, and closer citizen engagement.

Barcelona partnered with Microsoft and local integrators to deploy cloud and device solutions—Windows Server 2012 and VDI with Windows 8, Office 365 (Exchange Online), Windows Azure and Azure SQL, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SQL Server 2012—plus partner-built apps like the Third Place portal and the bigov BI/OpenData platform. The program delivered faster application performance and mobile access, a 30% reduction in payroll delivery costs for frontline staff, rapid launch and scalable hosting of services, improved transparency and citizen engagement through OpenData and CRM, and new economic opportunities for startups via the BizSpark program.

City of Barcelona

Manel Sanromá

CIO