AutomatedBuildings.com - Editorial Comments May / June 2003

As the self-designated Collector, Connector and Catalyst for large building automation industry information, I am extremely pleased with this month's issue. It brings together a lot of industry acceptance to the groundbreaking concepts painted on our website by our 160 plus authors.

Some of the early articles, as long as four years ago, were treated as StarTrek concepts by the industry but are actually happening now. I am pleased to see traditional building automation folks like Johnson Controls as well as new comers like WebGen reporting their successes with business models based on webware.

Last month's favorite article was on Ventilation Codes by Leonard A. Damiano. This is a strong indication of our industry interest in ventilation control. Mike Schell presents a response called CO₂ Control to the May issue article Ventilation Codes plus Len comes back with a Rebuttal. All interesting reading.

Due to the fact that a number of Committee members who plan to attend the meeting cannot stay over in Chicago until June 5th, we have re-scheduled the meeting of the XML/ Web Services Guideline Committee to June 3, 2003 from 4:00 P.M. to 6:00 P.M. Central Time.

We hope you can find time to attend REALCOMM 2003 June 4-5 Navy Pier, Chicago. It should be another ground breaking event. Jim Young reports:

Hewlett Packard has embarked on a new initiative called the Intelligent Building Solutions. This new initiative, headed out of Palo Alto, is devoted to helping building owners, operators and developers better understand the new opportunities which arise when technology is applied to their projects.

The April 28th edition of Newsweek featured a special section entitled, "The Next Frontiers". The article focused on "Connected Companies of the 21st Century" and how this new generation of company was redefining the rules and in many cases recalibrating their respective industries. Over the next few years these "Connected Companies" will continue to emerge as the new leaders, using technology, automation and the Internet to redefine the essence of their organizations.

As sponsor of the Intelligent Building Pavillion, CABA is pleased to be involved in Realcomm's Intelligent Building track. Sessions will include:

BuilConn in Dallas was a gratifying event for me; a lot of what we have been talking about on our web site for the past four years is now coming to pass. Finding this group of open-minded open systems people who are willing to discuss objectively all platforms to truly give the owner what he wants was inspirational. Open systems is an evolving concept and each opening of another system leads to a greater opening of our minds.

We have a few interviews that share the feeling of BuilConn; something significant happened there and it will take us all some time to completely comprehend.

Keith E. Gipson, CEO and CTO, Impact Facility Solutions www.myfacility.com co-founder of the world's first, internet based Enterprise Energy Management company, Silicon Energy Corp. provides some great industry insights in to the industry and BuilConn connection. Read the interview.

Jack McGowan shared the BuilConn Experience and kicked in with a great article on Deep Integration. Deep integration is a process rather than a conclusion, but it results in true Energy Web Services that companies can offer to go far beyond traditional DDC and Building Automation.

Jack and I have agreed to prepare yet another supplement/outsert as a joint venture with Engineered Systems for the November 2003 issue called "Selling Integration". Please feed either one of us with any information you have about our industries approach to selling our new metamorphous.

Our April joint venture supplement/outsert called "Control Convergence" went out this month to over 50,000 of Engineered Systems' readers in print and online to over 30,000 AutomatedBuildings.com readers. Although the printed message is [an error occurred while processing this directive] powerful It occurred to me while we were preparing the online version that the extra power of linking key words and concepts allowed the depth of the data and usefulness to be significantly increased over the printed format. Now if we can figure out how to take that power to the convenience of paper we will have a winning combination. So for now I recommend that you view the information in both formats.

I was pleased that my contributing editor and friend Tom Hartman joined me on this project and as usual delivered a powerful message that encourages all our minds to thinking bigger thoughts.

My ES column for April Community Convergence shares a common theme. Our business communities must converge as part of our transition to web-based ways.

A great article in our April issue called Economy Drives Convergence by Jeff Gollnick Communications Manager, Alerton Inc. adds further power to our Convergence theme.

I was very pleased to add to our Web Services Forum a proposal from Paul Ehrlich of Trane Global Controls Creating a standard for XML and Web Services for Building Control. An initial meeting to gauge interest and begin planning will be held at BuilConn in Dallas on April 23^rd from 1:00 – 3:00 PM. If you are interested in attending in person or via teleconference please RSVP to Kirk McElwain at kirkatcaba@sympatico.ca

I am also very excited that my abstract entitled "The Greening of Buildings with Automation" has been accepted for presentation at the CIBSE/ASHRAE Conference to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, September 24-26. http://xp20.ashrae.org/MEET/scotland2003-menu.htm. The conference title is “Building Sustainability, Value and Profit”.

In addition I have also been accepted to submit a paper on a similar topic to the Asia Pacific Conference on Built Environment 2003 18-19 November 2003 (Tue-Wed), Kowloon Shangri-la Hotel, Hong Kong http://www.ashrae.org.hk/apc2003/

Their theme is buildings will need to be responsive to human needs, yet reduce their environmental loadings.

I believe that our greatly changed large building automation industry is the key to many of the required solutions of Sustainability, Value, Profit, being responsive to human needs, while reducing environmental loadings. Yet as an industry we consistently fail to tell the world. Please help me take our message to the world by sharing your thoughts on this subject with me sinclair@automatedbuildings.com.

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