Niagara Summit 2022 Swooshed By—Accelerating Innovation

Therese Sullivan Customer Marketing Leader, Tridium Inc. Contributing Editor

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Tridium Niagara Gala at NASCAR Hall of Fame

The energy at Niagara Summit 2022, April 4-6 was incredible. As it says at the NS2022 website, “There are powerful forces driving the systems integration and controls industry toward a unified strategy for defining operational data, and the Niagara Summit is where vital conversations happen.” After nearly three years without an in-person event, the Niagara Community was ready to engage and interact face to face. Held in Charlotte, N.C., NS2022 attracted a powerful mix of people. It was an opportunity to collaborate on how to make buildings of all types as well as industrial plants smarter, healthier, more cyber secure and energy efficient.  Here are some highlights from the event:

·    Developer Day offered a rich education program for Niagara development partners who build their own solutions atop Niagara Framework®.

·    General Sessions covered the top-level business implications of trends like environmental social and governance (ESG) reporting mandates, the elevated role of role of real estate and facilities management people in enterprise decision-making, and supply chain challenges and energy price hikes.

·    Breakout Sessions offered deep-dives into edge-to-cloud workflows; the consulting/specifying engineer’s changing role, managing a proliferation of IoT devices; and leveraging the Niagara Community's fast-growing number of third-party solutions and drivers. Important panel discussions were held on data interoperability, cyber defense, data analytics, AI/ML and other topics.

·    Expo hours found the Charlotte Convention Center’s Richardson Ballroom packed with vendors meeting with Niagara Community partners and customers. New community member, Amazon Web Services, sponsored a ‘sandbox’ area – that is, a set of tables equipped with large displays where attendees could plug in their laptops and have impromptu business discussions.

·    The Gala Event was held at the NASCAR Hall of Fame – everyone lined up for the museum’s race-car simulation; it was a new way to have fun and ‘collabora-pete’ with one another.

·    While we were thrilled to engage with nearly 900 people in person, we also kept some of the learnings of virtual connections for those who could not attend. We launched a podcast at NS2022, and we will be releasing those recordings soon. Also, all sessions were recorded, and this content will be released at tridium.com/niagarasummit. We hope the Niagara Community continues the conversations and keeps Accelerating Innovation until our next Niagara Summit in 2024.

Charlotte Convention Center

Victor Abelairas, General Manager, Tridium

Mike Mitchell, Chief Technical Officer, Cochrane Supply & Engineering, demonstrating mixed-reality AR/VR technology where BAS and HVAC data are overlayed on top of live camera footage, creating a fully connected experience between the two worlds.

Launch of ‘Powered by Niagara’ Podcast with Therese Sullivan interviewing Rick Warner of MC Dean: Building Intelligence