The industry promotion of #BACnet #IP protocol has spurned OEM's and Systems Integrators to converge on the standard, turning every building #automation system into an #IT network. Some #buildings try to leverage shared #infrastructure, while other, more thorough designs spec out independent backbones. #Data from building systems is sent to the OEM, an #analytics #cloud or other third parties over the internet. Individual controllers are assigned IP addresses. Meanwhile, some building technology or #proptech people, and in particular #saas #software vendors are now pushing an #API strategy to integrate one vendor cloud into another, into another, into a single pane of glass. Making every system interdependent on an unrelated parties API, or someone else's cloud.

Is it time for a wake up call? Moving critical systems further and further away from the point of use... behind on a long list of companies that need to maintain dependencies. Behind one or two mega vendors selling rented server infrastructure. This article doesn't point out that Amazon's own website went down a few weeks ago because the content delivery provider they use went down (and it's not AWS). How can anyone rationalize this?

Why not just have all the features of the internet, but right in the building itself? Why not make the internet connect to the building, instead of make the building connect to the internet? We can build the internet into the building, at the physical layer, using advanced real-time #wireless #technology. Without using any IP addresses. Across vendors and hardware. And we are doing it today, even in existing buildings with existing controls. In software. On the edge. Contact me if you'd like to learn more.

Facebook Outage a Wake-Up Call for Proptech

Building owners and operates, beware

At around 11:40 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, Oct. 4, Facebook and everything it operates online, including Instagram and WhatsApp, crashed. That meant that users not only could not access the sites but couldn’t log in to any number of other apps and services using their accounts on the sites. 

The company blamed “configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centers.” Whatever the cause, the nearly seven-hour outage served as a stark reminder of why, for all its billions of users, the social media giant is something of a scary canary in the coal mine for an increasingly tech-reliant world.