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March 2014 |
Babel Buster Network Gateways: Big Features. Small Price. |
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Collaborating Mobile and Leveraging the
Cloud |
Ken
Sinclair, |
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Mobile
Collaboration that leverages the power of the cloud, coupled with Bring
Your Own Device “BYOD” is our newest do all power tool. Often in the
presence of our legacy laptops we still reach for this handy mobile
tool that seems to carry out our wishes quicker with a much more
personalized interface. The millions of hours of development of mobile
devices with the feedback of millions of users balancing device and
cloud power is starting to show that its real collaborated power is
greater than either device or cloud.
As I speak to my phone my words for this editorial are clouded and
converted to virtual text. An option exists to convert this text to any
other language. Voice commands allow many common functions to be
requested and carried out in a device cloud collaboration. Very
powerful stuff that evolves daily!
I just returned from a very successful cold and snowy AHRExpo 2014, New
York which according to Show organizer International Exposition
Company, a total of over 61,000 attendees (42,991 visitors and 18,219
exhibitor personnel) registered. Everyone was focusing on collaboration
with all the available evolving technologies. The event itself
highlighted the importance of the mobility piece. The ability to easily
navigate the AHRExpo show and ASHRAE meeting with two separate apps on
your phone was a clear demonstration that our collaborated capabilities
need to be mobile anywhere anytime. The correct balance of what was on
the cloud server and what was on your device became very apparent.
Mobile Collaboration with everything is building faster, stronger, cell
and Wi-Fi networks. In most buildings, campus, cities; etc. we are
seldom without one or the other and for most of the time we have both
and even several flavours of each. We expect this.
Since these wireless networks are designed for peak traffic times, they
like our electrical grid, have amazing spare capacity during off peak.
If we view data as a utility, which we should, opportunities exist to
utilize this resource off peak capacity to move our data at low cost
without increasing infrastructure by adding physical wires.
In this article, Mobile Network Operators (MNO) & Building Automation,
Therese Sullivan of www.buildingcontext.me noted:
Carriers have
pushed into new businesses like cellular M2M
(machine-to-machine) networking services, in part to compensate for the
business revenue they've lost to Internet companies providing instant
messaging and voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) calling for free. The
business case in M2M for the MNO is easy to make: they might only be
able to charge pennies per connection for an M2M deployment—compared to
an Average Revenue Per Connection of up to $50 for
person-to-person—but, the high volume of connections and low bandwidth
requirements justify their costs in maintaining the back-end system for
application development partners. That’s how it has worked in the
industrial verticals the MNOs have targeted thus far like utilities,
transportation, automotive and consumer electronics. Building
automation is next.
Followed by this:
A game
changing product that exemplifies such a partnership is
Intellastar’s portal services and the InferStack IoT software suite
bundled with a family of Intellastar platforms. Debuting at last
month’s AHR Conference in New York City, Intellastar (formally
SMARTCom) is offering remote commissioning and monitoring of a BAS
system based on competitively priced data plans that leverage the
global M2M cellular networks of partners like Verizon Wireless and
Vodafone. The InferStack IoT software suite is designed to monitor and
control heating, ventilating and air conditioning (HVAC), energy,
lighting, video security, fire, and other functions, for a single
building or a whole campus/enterprise. Intellastar’s VPN portal service
allows its customers to host their own VPN for real-time management of
their cellular resources (modems and data plans). Intellastar also
provides flexible plans where a typical systems integrator can roll
multiple years of cellular coverage into a single payment to make
budgeting for projects simpler to quote.
The use of cell networks was a growing trend on the exhibit floor, but
I sense our understanding of this powerful resource is well behind our
faint grasp and underachievement of implementation of smart electrical
grid. Almost every exhibit showed how the products or service could
interact with Mobile Collaboration.
Our Education sessions in New York were well attended and the
Collaboration in our Connected Community meeting was amazing. I was
extremely impressed with the clarity and conciseness of all our thought
leaders and the fact that very quickly the audience got involved in
providing questions and interactions. I was very pleased that we
quickly achieved the intended spirit of collaboration.
The folks from Controltrends videoed the complete session, a truly
amazing production, thank you Controltrends. Be sure to read our review
of this meeting and watch the video.
The power of mobile builds on how easy we can populate the cloud and
this article provides insight to how easy that can be A Cloud Data
Collection Platform for All by Rav Panchalingam of Bitpool.
Some people just want the burger, without the fries and
fancy toy.
I believe Marc
Petock hit the head on the nail in his last article for
January 2014 edition. Buzz words like ‘cloud’, ‘big data’, and
‘infographics’ has opened the floodgates for a swarm of new software
into the Energy Management space, many of which market themselves well,
but don’t quite meet the target of completing the circle and adding
value back to the end-user. 2014 will be the year the mist begins to
fade and we’ll begin to more distinctly recognise products in the
market that do more than just stimulate your interest based on hype and
pretty charts. They should actually, quantifiably, save you money on
running your building.
Here are a few
of my own observations of what’s happening in the industry right now:
• The software
geeks (and I can say that because I am one) are on an
all-time high coming off the news of recent Google acquisition of Nest.
This means more and more silicon valley startups on a quest to ‘change
the world of thermal comfort’ but don’t know what a chiller is
• The
automation guys are getting concerned and, let’s face it,
providing pushback to the idea of things being taken out of the scope
of their control. Do they need to learn HTML5 before they can program
the central plant?
• The
automation companies are hiring software development teams in
India to ensure they don’t get left behind, and of course the more
programmers you throw at a software project the better it will be,
right.
• The IT guys
see an even greater opportunity to be a pain-in-the-butt
to everyone by slowing things down or not allowing things to happen at
all. They’re loving it!
• The
management teams are slowly becoming amenable to the fact that
the billion dollar ‘cloud’ data centre is more secure than the USB hard
drive inside the plant room.
Connecting
commercial buildings into the cloud is still something which
must be championed by ambitious and technically savvy people who are
acting in the interest of the building owner—mainly consultants or
switched-on real estate managers, who have a good grasp of what they
want to use the software tools for. There are definitely some very good
software packages in the market right now, but they are selling
themselves as exactly that, a one-size-fits-all package. Once you buy
in, you’re seemingly locked in, which is ironic since the software
world is supposed to be all about freedom of choice.
As we leverage and populate the cloud we need to clearly understand who
owns the data. It is quite reasonable for the data to be in
several cloud camps but we need simple access in an extremely mobile
manner. Any web service provider that holds us hostage for data is
problematic.
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