What do you do when you have an industry-leading solution for analytics in the intelligent buildings market deployed to more than 20,000 buildings encompassing well over 1 billion square feet? Well, if you are SkyFoundry you add new features and make it easier to use!
The company recently held SkyPosium, its annual user conference in Washington DC. During the event, the SkyFoundry team showcased numerous important new features and enhancements for its signature product, SkySpark®.
Cloud Native Infrastructure
SkyFoundry is simplifying cloud deployment of SkySpark Cloud Native Infrastructure (CNI), a truly comprehensive suite of applications and tools. During SkyPosium, attendees experienced a live demonstration of a SkySpark system with 5 million sensor-data feeds and 5,000 facility sites running on Amazon Web Services (AWS)—with near instantaneous user response.
SkySpark CNI dramatically simplifies and reduces the cost of enterprise-scale cloud deployment. It also provides unprecedented scalability for IoT solution providers to seamlessly manage the data from billions of sensors, as shown by the live demo.
With SkySpark CNI, systems integrators can easily stand up and run SkySpark at enterprise-scale, without needing specialized DevOps skills, all while reducing cloud operating costs by optimizing the use of cloud services. SkySpark CNI creates a true, edge-to-cloud, distributed data-and-compute solution for IoT applications in the built environment
With CNI, SkyFoundry has effectively taken the scalability and extensibility of the SkySpark platform to the next level by cost-effectively exploiting cloud technology for cost-efficient, high-performance, and easy-to-manage cloud-scale deployment.
Comprehensive Map-based Navigation and More
Map-based navigation (“Maps”), one of the newest standard features of SkySpark, was another topic area discussed during SkyPosium. Maps allow users to display and navigate the facility portfolio and associated analytic results directly on dynamic maps. A range of visualization widgets, including bubble charts, bar charts, and gauges, show key performance data and allow for easy drill down into full site and performance details.
And, SkyFoundry has made setting up mapped-based navigation simple. Maps work directly from the address entered when defining a site or facility. SkySpark looks up the geocoordinates—meaning that as soon as a site is defined, it’s located on the map and all of its associated Apps and data are connected.
New Data Analysis features were also introduced for the Historian App, along with enhancements to the Greenhouse Gas (GhG) App. The SkySpark GhG App has been well received since its introduction at last year’s SkyPosium event. The App provides the ability to quickly convert energy meter data to GhG equivalents with just a few mouse clicks. The enhancements include integration of additional online data services providing GhG conversion factors. Learn more about the GhG App here: https://skyfoundry.com/file/459/Tracking-and-Reporting-Greenhouse-Gas-Performance—the-SkySpark-GhG-App.pdf
Haxall Enhancements – Accelerating the IoT
Acquiring data from a wide range of equipment systems, sensors, and other smart devices remains one of the key challenges in applying analytics and moving to data-driven facilities. Gateway development is not easy. Often, the companies with the best hardware development capabilities do not have deep experience with communication connectors and in the necessary web technologies to bring data to higher-level applications securely.
SkyFoundry has extensive experience with both, as well as with software assets that have been proven in the field—many for as long as 10 years. This proven code has been open-sourced to help accelerate the development and reduce the cost of creating IoT devices for the built environment under an initiative called Haxall (https://haxall.io/).
Haxall provides an open-source software framework designed to streamline the process of building IoT data products—both hardware and software. It includes a core subset of proven SkyFoundry code that addresses critical functions needed to connect to devices and equipment systems, normalize their data, and make it available to other applications in open standard formats. Haxall provides the software functions to communicate with external devices, capture semantic tagging at the edge, and communicate with external applications. It is powerful enough to run sophisticated applications at the edge or use it as a gateway to bring IoT data to cloud-based applications. Numerous enhancements to Haxall were announced at the event including the introduction of a Haxall Developer Support program. Contact SkyFoundry to learn more.
Community Presentations – Data Analytics in the Real World
SkyPosium is a true community event with an entire track dedicated to presentations from end users and SkyFoundry partners that demonstrate best practices and unique solutions across a wide range of applications. These real-world examples show the clear tangible operational and financial benefits of applying data analytics to facilities of all types. The complete agenda of community presentations can be found here: https://www.skyfoundryevents.com/skyposium-usa-2022/agenda-2022/
To learn more about SkyFoundry or SkySpark and its comprehensive suite of features and tools, visit https://skyfoundry.com/.
About SkyFoundry
SkyFoundry provides software solutions to create value from the data produced by the Internet of Things. SkySpark® Everywhere™ is a comprehensive software platform for connecting, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data from smart devices and equipment systems. SkySpark’s automated analytics, KPIs, Energy, and GhG Apps, turn your data into actionable intelligence providing improved performance, reduced downtime, and operational savings. More information is available at http://www.skyfoundry.com.
