It's not really digital signage, but long-timers in this industry might be curious about what Jose Avalos is up to, now that he has left his long-running gig as the main guy at Intel on the digital signage file.

Avalos is now Co-Founder, CEO & Chief Revenue Officer of an Intel spinoff called AustinGIS - offering digital transformation as-a-service, which has the awful acronym DTaaS. That means financing and turnkey solutions at scale for technology projects

The company began operations last fall, but has now officially launched.

The technology and investment partners backing the firm include Intel, IT service firm HCL Technologies (HCL), smart city solutions firm RADARApp/RADAR USA, Tech Mahindra (IT consulting) and VSBLTY Groupe Technologies (AI analytics).

These partners, says PR, all help provide end-to-end technology solutions, smoother implementations and quicker and more efficient scaling to AustinGIS customers. AustinGIS’ large-scale financing of IoT infrastructure comes with a complete services approach to the retail, education, municipality, industrial, energy and transportation industries.

“We create value for our customers by making large-scale Infrastructure-as-a-Service deployments affordable and accessible," says Avalos. "Our solutions are secure, reliable, manageable and scalable. Because we finance the CapEx—as well as provide installation and management of our validated turnkey solutions—we make it easy to buy, deploy, manage and service IoT solutions at scale.”

“We are advancing Digital Transformation with a custom DTaaS business model," adds Anupam Srivastava, Co-Founder, CFO & Head of Strategy. "Together—with our partners—we bring technology, installation expertise, client relationships, manufacturing prowess, supply chain efficiencies and, most importantly, infrastructure and project financing capabilities to empower rapid scaling while de-risking project economics.”

The new company already cites a reference use-case:  In partnership with VSBLTY and RADARApp, AustinGIS deployed a community-based collaboration security solution that places the citizen at the center of public safety. This “citizen safety” program in Mexico City provides smart infrastructure capable of generating data and alerts on criminal events. The service offered an app that citizens can load onto their mobile phones to trigger an emergency response, if necessary, as well as content sharing for neighborhood watch and an on-screen panic button. The all-in-one DTaaS offering included outdoor mounted high-definition (HD) cameras, high intensity lighting, advanced analytics reporting, and public safety applications. This was all powered by machine learning and computer vision.

This service has proven quite successful. In fact, this deployment enabled the Benito Juarez municipality to achieve a 45.88% reduction in the incidence of high-impact crimes, and an increase in the community perception of security from 51% to 72% from 2019 to 2022, positioning the Benito Juarez municipality of Mexico City as second highest in perception of security at the national level. This is a result that has never been achieved in more than 20 years of available data and the highest positive impact within Mexico City for more than a year in a row.