Editor's note:  Anto forwarded this reflection on BuilConn Europe.  The author was an attendee who also wrote in an email "Anto, We talk about connectivity - but here in the Namibian desert, being a contractor there is nothing, we have GSM, but no GPRS, so we connect via CSD at 9600 at a cost of 1USD a minute and we pray the link does not break!

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Have you got it?

Was it the technology, global players, emerging standards or the people, and why and what were they doing here? I am talking about BuilConn Amsterdam 2005, a building convergence conference for those people that have got it and those still searching.

I think they came to discuss some sort of intelligence but found it difficult to quantify. If we compare it to human intelligence, which in the past was quantified in IQ..... but now in EQ that's more difficult to quantify! So is it true that those that get it know that there are benefits, and that there is value somewhere but are finding it hard to quantify? What happens if everyone in the food chain shared this view?

How do you quantify the value of having a cell phone, but yet are ubiquitously aware of the value? What happens when the cell phone delivers a dashboard of current and relevant information, to the CFO just before he is about to make a strategic decision?

We discussed partnering. Who to partner in such a difficult environment? And do giants partner small niche companies?

What about this idea of integrating building automation to the enterprise ? Its going to require lots of things to be in place, including this value proposition we have been talking about for the last few years, but even if its all in place, how do we get our audience with the decision makers? Who are they? Did we get there to late in the process? Who is going to make the sale? What are they buying? Did you quantify it? What terms are you going to use? Cisco, IBM,  Samsung? Or Zigbee, OPC, CCTV, HMI?

Some answers were found in the keynotes, some in the content rich sessions and some on the exhibition floor. However I feel that most of the answers were found talking to the stalwarts of our building automation industry and those new guys on the block from the IT world. We were probably having lunch together, or maybe a beer after hours, or maybe we were in the Van Gogh Museum, it does not matter, we were networking and some diverse but great ideas were reaching maturity and new partnerships appearing.

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