EMAIL INTERVIEW – Ken Sinclair and Sakhee Chandrayan

Sakhee Chandrayan, Industry Consultant - Open standards and protocol, Building Automation Systems.
Sakhee’s career spans over 18 years of product, business and customer experience focused on enterprise-scale software for sustainable building solutions and open standards and protocols.

sakhee@yesperanza.com

LinkedIn INBAC group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10395360/

Sinclair:  What is INBAC initiative? 

Chandrayan:  INBAC initiative is a call for Open Systems Building Automation Community in India. An invitation to design the future of symbiotic growth of Open Systems Building Automation community. The idea is to create an ecosystem for sustainable growth and interdependence.

India is a fertile ground for Innovations and Growth in Building Automation System. “India is the only trillion-dollar economy to rank among the top five fastest growing economies in the world. The $2 trillion economy is expected to clock an average annual growth of 7.73% during 2017-19, backed by strong macroeconomic fundamentals, robust domestic demand, favorable demographics, ample resources and a proactive government.” Says Nasdaq

Internationalbanker lists promising sectors of Indian Economy to be Engineering, contributing to almost 8%, InfoTech industry contributing to the extent of almost 60% and Real Estate contributing to almost 13% of the country’s GDP. These sectors play a vital role as a catalyst for enabling the growth of the Building Automation Industry in India.
Building automation and Home Automation spaces are also galvanized by two important initiatives by Indian Government:

• Smart City Initiative
• Promotion of entrepreneurs and start-ups

This calls for collaborative efforts of setting up or adapt to open standard /protocols for Building Automation Products in the local context of India.

Sinclair:  What do you plan to achieve with INBAC?

Chandrayan:  The two most important goals of INBAC are Solution Synergy and Industry Collaboration. There is a constant need of Global lookout and local impact. To leverage the power of digitalization, it is important to put Innovations and Growth in the building automation Industry into a perspective, which is both backward compatible and future proof at the same time.

The products with global lookout and local impact assure solution endurance.

Let’s take an example UBER. Uber has integrated global APIs from Google Maps and Banks which makes its service highly dependable as it is not limited to any region or country or continent. Uber looks “My very own” with the incorporation of global standards still serving to local needs. Integrating global APIs helps Uber’s growth in another important way – faster time to market, as the development and enhancements of integrated APIs are purely based on collaboration and interdependence needs of the era.

It is of vital interest and effect for the Indian Building Automation industry to focus on Innovations and Growth by incorporating Global BAS standards, and to gain from Global Collaborations and Interdependence.

The ultimate aim is to create Simple Buildings.
 
Sinclair:  What do you mean by Simple Buildings?

Chandrayan:  For years, buildings have been growing to be smart and intelligent. Smart / Intelligent buildings which understand and serve what we need with state-of-art automation. This is an essential step in the journey of simplicity. In recent time the industry also has started talking about emotions which are created by buildings.
Eventually, we all have been making progress towards buildings which are intuitive and simple in both the aspects of usage and maintenance.

“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” said Leonardo da Vinci.

It is important to look beyond the limitations of tactical solutions to reach ultimate sophistication. This needs a vision for the greater good.

Sinclair:  What is the current phase of INBAC?

[an error occurred while processing this directive] Chandrayan:  An exploratory project was initiated to learn the interests of the Building Automation Industry in India. This project is focused on exploring understanding by discussions with key Leaders in the Building Automation Industry in India, and the results look as follows:

• Market players are interested in symbiotic growth -
  

• Big players look at the advantage of time-to-market (faster development and lesser overheads), collaboration for disruptive innovations and collaboration in the local context
• Small and Medium size players look at the advantage of a platform for learning how to make interoperable solutions and platform to showcase their products

To explore in next phase:

• Government's initiative to launch 100 smart cities in India
  

• Create awareness and thereby the market for open standards and protocols to leverage the power of digitalization
• Promote the usage of data as a product (Measure - Analyze - Act) for increased Energy Saving and Security Needs and reduced CO2 and waste (To align to the principle - "though the funds are individual, resources are common")

• Smart City Support groups - Like Universities, NGOs, Innovation Incubation centers:

• Support and educate in open standards and protocols and global innovations which will help to make solutions interoperable for early integrations
  
• Student activities and involvement to make students ready for Industry by bringing in practical knowledge

• Standardization bodies Global / Local

• Identify problems in Indian BAS industry, what are upcoming innovations and what approach is needed from a local industry perspective

Under this initiative, we are developing an Open Systems Building Automation Community in India. I invite all the global leaders to support this initiative with their connections in India and the global experience.

Stay in touch as we move forward:
sakhee@yesperanza.com 

Or join the LinkedIn INBAC group: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/10395360/