EMAIL INTERVIEW – John Petze and Ken Sinclair

John Petze, C.E.M., is a partner in SkyFoundry, the developers of SkySpark™, an analytics platform for building, energy and equipment data. John has over 30 years of experience in building automation, energy management and M2M, having served in senior level positions for manufacturers of hardware and software products including Tridium, Andover Controls, and Cisco Systems. At SkyFoundry he is working to bring the next generation of information analytics to the “Internet of Things”.

Sinclair:  John, tell us a bit about the new developments SkyFoundry will be showing at the Niagara Summit?

Petze: There have been a tremendous number of advances to the SkySpark platform since the last summit two years ago – new applications, new data connectors including integration with Energy Star, an expanded library of analytic functions, and during that time SkySpark has been deployed across thousands of buildings.

As far as recent additions that we will be showing at the summit, one of the areas we have been focusing on is to expand the reporting and visualization tools to support the workflow process that is essential to resolving issues and achieving improved operation. We are constantly enhancing and creating new tools to help operators understand what issues have been found, the cause, correlations with other issues, and the cost and energy impact of those issues. All of these tools support the effort to address issues to improve operations.

One of the latest additions to SkySpark is a range of tools to create custom reports to show data, trends, and of course “sparks” – our term for analytic findings that represent, faults, deviations, anomalies, and opportunities for savings. We added a range of tools based on user feedback, as well as the ability to assemble the new views into pdf reports. These reports can be emailed on a schedule basis too. Here is a quick view of some examples:

These new tools add to two other very important visualization tools we added a while back – Bubble Charts and KPI displays. Bubble charts help managers see summary information on the issues being detected by analytic rules. For example, summaries of the types of issues being found, how often they occur, how long they last, their magnitude and in many cases their actual cost in dollars. Here is a quick example:

We will be showing these and other new features of SkySpark at the Niagara summit, April 27-29 in Las Vegas. Attendees can find us in booth 310.

More information on SkySpark® analytics is available at www.skyfoundry.com