EMAIL INTERVIEW Keith E. Gipson & Ken Sinclair

Keith E. Gipson, CTO, Impact Facility Solutions

Mr. Gipson has been a technologist for 20 years. Starting out as a Technician with Honeywell Inc. in 1987, an Engineer at Johnson Controls in the mid-90's and at Pacific Gas and Electric in 1997.  In 1997 he co-founded the world's first, Internet based Enterprise Energy Management company, Silicon Energy Corp. The privately held company grew from three persons to a 200 plus employee, multi-million dollar company.  Silicon Energy was acquired by Itron in March 2003.  Mr. Gipson was Awarded United States Patent number 6,178,362, Jan 23, 2001 as Co-inventor of: an Energy Management System and Method utilizing the Internet to perform Facility and Energy Management of large corporate enterprises. Recently Mr. Gipson was honored by Southern California Edison as a "modern day African-American inventor" for his contributions to the electric industry.

Integration to legacy Facility Management Systems

 In most customer's portfolios of buildings, 70-90% of the systems are more than six years old (Y2K upgrade) with some up to fifteen years old...or more!

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Sinclair:  Keith, what's going on in the industry as far as Impact Facility Solutions?

Gipson:  Ken, I'm very excited about the current surge in interest for integration to legacy Facility Management Systems!

Sinclair:  Really? What's driving the increased interest?

Gipson:  In Barney Capehart's latest book (Web Based Enterprise Energy and Building Automation Systems), I had an article on "Monitoring Based Commissioning". The need for historical trend data has fueled several large integration projects for Impact. We have also been retained to provide system integration services for several MBCx providers, as a standard.

Sinclair:  How is the integration accomplished?

Gipson:  Well, open standards like BACnet, LonWorks and even the occasional XML/web-service interface has certainly made it easier to acquire data from new Facility Management Systems, however in most customer's portfolios of buildings, 70-90% of the systems are more than six years old (Y2K upgrade) with some up to fifteen years old...or more!

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Sinclair:  So, gateways are being used?

Gipson:  Gateways are back in style. What we're seeing, is that as these commissioning projects are awarded, the trending/system integration is left as an "implementation detail". This is a serious detail to overlook!

Sinclair:  What are some of the other benefits of gateways?

Gipson:  That's an important point. I think that most people think of gateways as primarily being used as a real-time, control (field) system interfaces, but most of the time we deploy them as automated data acquisition devices for trending, which is not a mission critical task. Of course, our gateway applications do allow for control commands back to the FMS, of a selective basis. Demand Response for example.

Sinclair:  What's the best way to get a hold of you for those interested in myFacility's gateway technology?

Gipson: My e-mail is kgipson@myfacility.com