Team building
Homes and offices of the future will be smartened up with sensors and connected with computers. And for VARs, the whole may prove greater than the sum of its parts
November 2012 saw the Ministry of Defence (MoD) infrastructure arm sign up IBM to smarten up the management of 4,000 separate sites and pieces of real estate ranging from barracks to naval bases and training grounds, covering about 45,000 buildings, 55,000 houses and 135,000 single-living spaces across 900 square miles.
Faced with continuing public sector cuts and calls for increased efficiency as well as updates to ageing infrastructure, one of the UK's largest landowners opted to invest in a new centralised information management system featuring Trirega, a key software-and-services offering in Big Blue's Smarter Planets portfolio.
Applying advanced analytics - including mobile data capture and processing in real time - to property-based infrastructure allows the MoD to optimise its use of real estate as well as save money: buildings, for example, account for nearly half of all UK carbon emissions. Benefits to the MoD from the project are expected to begin accruing this year.
Simon Parsons, senior managing consultant at IBM Global Business Services, and a leader of Big Blue's smarter buildings initiative, confirms that organisations of all sizes are beginning to take a more holistic view of the role of real estate - offices, buildings, campuses and even cities - in maximising performance, both by improving the experience for users and boosting the efficiency and savings in the short, medium and longer term.
"Smart buildings are about putting in the systems and capability and stuff but really for me it comes back to the data around the buildings. What can the buildings tell us? And what clever things can we do with it? It's quite a data play," he says.
The kinds of areas on which IBM is focusing include but are not limited to cooling, emissions, heating and lighting. Most, if not all, organisations stand to benefit from improved efficiency regarding the use of all these, yet efficiency cannot be maximised without considering the physical asset - the building which houses the business - and the way it responds to inputs from the internal and external environment.
"At a high level, we're looking at end-to-end life cycles. The steps include working out what a building is about and what it is used for, as well as what opportunities there are for optimisation," says Parsons. "You are reducing costs as well as increasing sustainability."
Data strategy can and should be taken into account long before the initial piles are driven for new buildings, and IT companies will increasingly be expected to partner stakeholders to retrofit existing buildings, connecting everything from lighting to security to facilities and waste management.
Smart metering and sensors can be employed all over to enable data capture, monitoring and reporting.
This is an opportunity involving the entire supply chain, notes Parsons, and as the climate changes - as per the latest floods - supporting innovative building development becomes critical.
"From an IT perspective, it is systems architecture, taking a bunch of systems and putting them together, and then what are you going to use to analyse it (the data) and what will it deliver? Is it reporting?" Parsons (pictured, left) says. "And what is it worth?"
The approach, he notes, will be broadly the same whether a customer has one building or a conurbation. Many of the products and services are fairly generic - it's about working out how to put them together.
He gives Florida-based IBM partner Flagship Solutions and its work on the Miami Dolphins' 75,000-seat Sun Life Stadium as an example.
Flagship implemented IBM's Intelligent Operations Centre for Smart Cities cloud service with real-time analytics with a view to improving stadium customers' experience, encompassing real-time traffic flow information, visitors' dining preferences, and security incidents as well as data from feeds such as weather forecasts and social networking.
Having various intelligent, automated systems means crowd control management can incorporate real-time geospatial intelligence and audiovisual notifications to help staff move visitors around the stadium more rapidly on the day, minimising overcrowding.
"Whether you sell or implement a stack, or collaborate with us on services, or actually are an OEM provider, there are opportunities for the channel," confirms Parsons.
UK managed services and IT provider Intrinsic Technology has been dipping its toes into the market, with a project involving the City of Glasgow College blazing a trail that others might follow.
Building blocks of learning
John McGowan, regional sales manager for Scotland at Intrinsic, says the large contract involves a complete infrastructure fit-out as well as ongoing teamwork with a range of stakeholders - including the Glasgow Learning Quarter (GLQ) consortium led by civil engineering and construction firm Sir Robert McAlpine, involving two new buildings as well as the other non-IT elements as part of a 25-year contract. Consultancy FES will advise on and provide mechanical, electrical and IT design alongside facilities management and life cycle services.
"It's very, very high spec, and actually a big driver for data storage," says McGowan. "For example, all students and staff will get a smartcard that can be charged up for use at the cafes and for opening doors, and also for gaining access to the halls of residence."
An array of corporate and student IT requirements will be embedded into the buildings' fabric, and integrated into one network, based on Cisco infrastructure. Voice, video and data all work together alongside the building management systems.
Green principles are to the fore, as are cost reduction and achieving a built environment, through integrating the design and the technology as well as analysing the data collected and stored, that will help maximise learning potential at the same time, McGowan says.
Taking such a holistic view that involves inter-industry collaboration and subcontracting at this level means a great deal of complexity - so it's no surprise that the initial contract document took a long time to finalise and runs to more than 1,000 pages.
However, one net result is that the school will save so much money from having everything integrated from the start that it will be able to achieve much more for its students, "right down to the virtual desktops", as well as those who work within its walls through more innovative investments, McGowan adds.
"Five or 10 years ago, these systems were proprietary, but now everything is becoming IP-based and the cost is coming down," he says.
"This is the way of the future."
A question of timing
A Royal Academy of Engineering roundtable last year brought together industry players to discuss what it sees as an imperative for future built environments.
Business as usual in the development sector is not an option, it said in its follow-on report, and construction itself may have to change to enable new buildings - which are generally expected to last 50 to 100 years - to evolve with the shorter two-to-five-year life cycle of technology infrastructures.
They agreed that smart building tools - building information modelling - must be considered and planned for during the initial construction process, ensuring all the data that will be collected will be shared, is non-duplicated and works together.
Big data and analytics must make sense of data from all the systems involved in a building, from lights to doorways, cameras and air conditioning.
Data-enabled machine learning may be harnessed to make a building smart and responsive to changes in its use and to user behaviour as well as climate. Sensors deployed should be able to query the building for real-time updates.
Appropriate design harnessing passive climate control must be considered and integrated with the IT elements to realise the greatest benefits. This means more inter- and intra- industry partnerships and complex contracting relationships than ever before.
Risks exist; they include information and data security, governance, maintenance, and regulatory compliance, and all must be addressed within successful partnerships which have worked, amid other things, to create umbrella systems that manage and control disparate elements.
"For example, if building management systems (BMS) operated by the facilities team are connected to corporate systems operated by the corporate IT team, there needs to be clarity about who takes responsibility for protecting the security of the BMS, which has the characteristics of a control system rather than a typical enterprise computer system," the academy writes in its report.
"This could also allow building performance information to be available via an enterprise dashboard which can provide a visual understanding of the key performance indicators and metrics. In multi-occupancy or multi-use buildings, the complex business models of building ownership and tenancy can also result in confusion."
It may be heartening to hear that a professional field beyond IT can demonstrate an understanding of the potential pitfalls. Of course, all stakeholders, including IT leaders, engineers, property developers, and end users must work together to make the visions presented a reality.
The smart buildings concept dovetails neatly with Cisco's vision for a $5tn (￡3tn) Internet of Everything (IoE) market, where people, processes, data and things are all connected, through edge analytics and cloud, to provide a more liveable environment, including using IT to enhance the built environment.
February saw the vendor announce a Smart City Global Strategic Alliance with infrastructure technology and security provider AGT International.
Rob Lloyd, president of development and sales at Cisco, says the duo will collaborate on cloud-based responses to urban problems. "By combining advanced technologies with a deep understanding of the changing needs of cities, we can transform the delivery of city services," Lloyd says.
Cisco intelligent networking, virtualised computing and video management software is being combined with AGT's smart city software platform, sensor gateway and analytics, with the results being applied to city services from transportation and healthcare to utilities infrastructure, disaster recovery, and personal safety.
The first offerings will be on-premise from mid-2014, including traffic management that will identify, respond to, and resolve traffic incidents using live video feeds, analytics, wireless magnetic sensors buried in footpaths, licence plate readers, advanced traffic modelling predictions, and social media. Eventually, they will all be SaaS, the vendor says.
According to the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, traffic congestion costs $121bn a year in time and petrol in the US alone.
Mati Kochavi, chief executive at AGT, says the collaboration aims for a holistic view of urban ecosystems challenged by dramatic growth and limited resources. "The opportunity stems from integrating information from the IoE and leveraging data in new ways. It will transform the cities of today into the great cities of tomorrow," Kochavi says.
Steve Browell, CTO at Intrinsic (pictured, right), says future developments will integrate robust wireless networking with buildings from day one, especially as people use more connected devices. This in itself creates a big opportunity, without even getting into newer areas of building-information and data analytics.
"For example, how many fit-outs include the sockets needed to charge more and more devices?" he says.
He also wonders whether the government should not be adding more impetus in the form of smart-building initiatives, beyond the Smart Cities funding offered to places such as Glasgow. Could it not be extended to businesses - offering tax breaks for smarter offices, for instance?
"Smart hybrid IT could encourage organisations to consume appropriate cloud services to reduce their on-site IT footprint and use shared infrastructure that, overall, means less total power is consumed, less cooling and the like," Browell suggests.
Climate changes will call for true innovation
The latest round of floods has highlighted the pressures being brought to bear on the UK's built environment. Forecasts suggest that by 2080, the UK will have warmer, wetter winters, hotter, drier summers and more extreme weather events. Buildings erected today need innovation to cope, and solutions - some of which will involve IT - must be found to problems of increasing pressure on resources such as drinking water and energy supply and having sustainable, affordable, life-enhancing UK homes and businesses.
Source: The Technology Strategy Board's "Design for Future Climate Report", 2010
Smart buildings make for smarter cities
Enough smart buildings in one place (and of course a smart cathedral) may make a smart city. Smart-city initiatives have been popping up all over. Songdo in South Korea, a ￡35bn business district project masterminded by US developer Gale International, aims to use "the most advanced sustainable design and construction practices" to benefit cities and their inhabitants. In Songdo, landscape design, architecture, and construction will be integrated with IT and other technologies for 65,000 residents and 300,000 commuters for work, rest and play.
Source: www.songdo.com