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December 2011
Interview
AutomatedBuildings.com
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EMAIL
INTERVIEW
- Joe Noworatzky and Ken
Sinclair
Joe Noworatzky, Vice President,
Engineering, Building Technology, and
Services Line of Business, Building
Efficiency,
Johnson
Controls Inc.
Joe.H.Noworatzky@jci.com
Joe is
responsible for worldwide engineering product and system development
and program management. His team develops products for Building Energy
Management Systems, Building Automation Systems, Wireless, Sensors and
actuators, and refrigeration control devices.
Johnson Controls Panoptix™ Solution
Collecting data from
disparate building systems and creating a single, integrated view of
building and system performance.
Sinclair:
The Panoptix™ solution was
launched at Greenbuild this year – please tell me more about it.
Noworatzky:
This is a complete solution – a combination of
software and services that more easily and cost effectively helps
customers achieve optimized building performance and energy
efficiency.
Featuring an open-platform, cloud-hosted application suite and an
intuitive user experience, the solution simplifies what
traditionally has been a very complex process by collecting data from
disparate building systems and creating a single, integrated view of
building and system performance. The applications and advanced
analytics provide actionable insight, allowing customers to identify
ways to achieve increased levels of energy savings and building
performance optimization.
Applications are delivered through a subscription-based model.
This gives building owners and operators the flexibility to select only
the applications most critical for their needs, alleviates the need to
access capital to get started and makes the solution more readily
accessible to a very broad set of customers.
The platform and application suite are complemented with new
support services: Live Guide support and Connected Community. These new offers work hand in hand with the existing
portfolio of Johnson Controls building and energy management services
to implement the performance and energy improvement measures identified
through the use of Panoptix applications.
Sinclair:
When we first spoke about this
solution, you mentioned Live
Guide support and Connected Community. Would you please explain these
concepts a bit more?
Noworatzky:
Taken together, Live Guide™ support and the Connected Community offer
unprecedented support to Panoptix
customers. Live Guide™ support provides access to
Johnson Controls building efficiency experts, whose goal is to guide
customers as they use the applications. The Connected
Community is the first of its kind in the building efficiency industry
-- an online resource for the solution users and non-users
alike that connects them online with subject matter experts, industry
thought leaders and others to share tips, answer questions and learn
about the latest trends in building efficiency. Connected Community
participants can directly access building efficiency related
information, forums and blogs as well as social networking tools.
Sinclair:
How does the Panoptix solution
actually work?
Noworatzky:
The offering is based on an open integration platform. The
platform is open to a multitude of building systems via a series of
“adapters” and open to the applications via a series of services. The
platform collects large amounts of disparate data from the varied
building systems and “normalizes” that data to provide a consistent
presentation to the applications developed by Johnson Controls or third
parties, including customer-developed applications.
The platform and the applications are hosted in the cloud. The
cloud-based hosting provides several advantages. First, it enables
capital versus expense trade-offs for customers. It also simplifies
installation and allows for rapid deployment of new value-driven
offerings. Finally, cloud-based hosting leverages computing power to
perform high-level analytics. These patented analytics are available to
any of the applications, eliminating duplication of functionality and
providing optimized building intelligence.
The platform is a scalable, open, integrating application and
IT-friendly framework. It allows for data access from anywhere and from
any device for any customer.
Sinclair:
Just to be clear, this solution is
not another building management system. What makes it different from a
BMS?
Noworatzky:
A
building management system (BMS) is a control system used to ensure
comfortable indoor environments. The Panoptix solution is a powerful
suite of applications and support that work hand-in-hand with nearly
any BMS to provide the analytics and actionable information necessary
to ensure a single facility or a portfolio of facilities is as
efficient as possible. This solution combines BMS data with
other important data, including utility consumption and weather data,
to provide in-depth analysis. In fact, it can
utilize data from building, business and specialty systems and is most
powerful when provided with as much data as the user can provide via
the existing BMS and other building systems.
Sinclair:
How will this system integrate
with an organization’s IT department?
Noworatzky:
The
solution is an IT-friendly technology, which is sold as
Software as a Service (SaaS), and provides experts who can work with
the customer’s IT department to leverage the latest technologies to fit
within current IT policies.
Sinclair:
How will it support the trend
toward “big data” and the analytics being applied to that data?
Noworatzky:
Bringing
big data up from the building systems or equipment level is
the next step toward knowing how to run facilities in the most
efficient manner. As the volume, variety and velocity of data
increases, this solution makes it easy to collect, manage and
analyze that data, converting it into a common language and turning it
into intuitive actionable insight. This data can be used to:
- Understand how efficiently
mechanical and electrical equipment is running
- Track how efficiently building
systems are operating in real time
- Minimize energy consumption and
labor costs using data-driven maintenance techniques
As a
result, users have improved visibility into their systems and can begin
to operate in a more proactive and efficient way.
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Sinclair:
How can customers be assured their
data is secure?
Noworatzky:
It’s
important to note that Panoptix customers own their own data.
Johnson Controls will only use it to provide customer support and
expert advice on their current applications or the delivery of
related services and offerings.
Four security elements are in place to protect customer data:
- Physical security of data
storage. Johnson Controls
has engaged an independent third-party security analysis firm to
perform a SAS-70, Level 2 security assessment of its data center
partner. Johnson Controls also requires that the data
center partner segregate the Panoptix data center equipment from all
other equipment in their data center.
- Security during data
transmission: Message security
at the network transport and payload level utilizes industry standard
HTTPS communication channels and Secure Socket Layer security
certificates. This is the same type of security mechanism commonly used
for online IT transactions. Also, the customer site connectivity to the
Panoptix data center is provided only through outbound
communications.
- Protection from unauthorized
access: All user
access to data is controlled through encrypted authentication and is
made through a secure HTTPS browser connection. In addition, the user
accounts provide a granular authorization model that allows customers
to assign the proper permissions to each of their users.
- Protection from denial service
and other attacks:
The Panoptix solution has been designed around IT best practices and
architectures. Thus, it supports standard IT configurations as it
pertains to firewalls, routers, switches and DMZs. It also supports the
physical and logical separation of web tier (user facing) and data tier
(business logic and data storage) architectures.
Sinclair:
What
applications will be offered with the initial phase
of the Panoptix solution?
Noworatzky: The initial offering includes
four applications, each backed by Live Guide™ support and the Connected
Community:
- Continuous Diagnostics Advisor
monitors energy
consumption, identifies equipment issues and reduces operating costs.
- Carbon and Energy Reporter
provides insight to reduce energy usage and carbon footprint reduction.
- Measurement and Verification
Monitor measures
savings of energy efficiency projects and identifies key usage drivers
and unanticipated impacts.
- Custom Analyzer provides trend
analysis to diagnose
problems, compare energy usage across buildings and export capability
for reporting.
The
Panoptix suite of applications will continue to expand, with both
Johnson Controls and partner-developed applications that address a
number of subjects, including integrated controls, alarm management and
customer defined workflows as well as more adapters to connect with
more data types, and more analytics.
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