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Microsoft, big data and smarter buildings

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Smarter building dashboard

If you checked out the New York Times Snow Fall site (the story of the Avalanche at Tunnel Creek), then Microsoft’s new 88 Acres site will look familiar. If you haven’t seen the Snow Fall site then go check it out, it is a beautiful and sensitive telling of a tragic story. You won’t regret the few minutes you spend viewing it.

Microsoft’s 88 Acres is an obvious homage to that site, except that it tells a good news story, thankfully, and tells it well. It is the story of how Microsoft is turning its 125-building Redmond HQ into a smart corporate campus.

Microsoft’s campus had been built over several decades with little thought given to integrating the building management systems there. When Darrell Smith, Microsoft’s director of facilities and energy joined the company in 2008, he priced a ‘rip and replace’ option to get the disparate systems talking to each other but when it came in at in excess of $60m, he decided they needed to brew their own. And that’s just what they did.

Using Microsoft’s own software they built a system capable of taking in the data from the over 30,000 sensors throughout the campus and detecting and reporting on anomalies. They first piloted the solution on 13 buildings on the campus and as they explain on the 88 Acres site:

In one building garage, exhaust fans had been mistakenly left on for a year (to the tune of $66,000 of wasted energy). Within moments of coming online, the smart buildings solution sniffed out this fault and the problem was corrected.
In another building, the software informed engineers about a pressurization issue in a chilled water system. The problem took less than five minutes to fix, resulting in $12,000 of savings each year.
Those fixes were just the beginning.

The system balances factors like the cost of a fix, the money that will be saved by the fix, and the disruption a fix will have on employees. It then prioritises the issues it finds based on these factors.

Microsoft facilities engineer Jonathan Grove sums up how the new system changes his job “I used to spend 70 percent of my time gathering and compiling data and only about 30 percent of my time doing engineering,” Grove says. “Our smart buildings work serves up data for me in easily consumable formats, so now I get to spend 95 percent of my time doing engineering, which is great.”

The facilities team are now dealing with enormous quantities of data. According to Microsoft, the 125 buildings contain 2,000,000 data points outputting around 500,000,000 data transactions every 24 hours. The charts, graphics and reports it produces leads to about 32,300 work orders being issued per quarter. And 48% of the faults found are corrected within 60 seconds. Microsoft forecasts energy savings of 6-10% per year, with an implementation payback of 18 months.

Because Microsoft’s smart building tool was built using off the shelf Microsoft technologies, it is now being productised and will be offered for sale. It joins a slew of other smarter building solutions currently on the market from the likes of IBM, Echelon, Cisco et al, but given this one is built with basic Microsoft technologies, it will be interesting to see where it comes in terms of pricing.

Price will certainly be one of the big deciding factors in any purchasing decision, any building management tool will need to repay it’s costs within at least 18 months to merit consideration. Functionality too will be one of the primary purchase filters and what is not clear at all, from the Microsoft report, is whether their solution can handle buildings on multiple sites or geographies. If I hear back either way from Microsoft on this, I will update this post.

This is a market that is really starting to take off. Navigant Research (formerly Pike Research) issued a report last year estimating the size of the smart building managed services market alone will grow from $291m in 2012 to $1.1bn by 2020. While IMS Research estimated the Americas market for integrated and intelligent building systems was be worth more than $24 billion in 2012.

One thing is for sure, given that buildings consume around 40% of our energy, any new entrant into the smarter buildings arena is to be welcomed.

Image credit nicadlr

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IBM Pulse redux – Smarter, sustainable.

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I attended IBM’s service management conference IBM Pulse last week and I came away very impressed with how IBM’s suite of Smarter solutions is nailing sustainability (even if that’s not how they see it!).

The main areas I was interested in were the Smarter Cities, Smarter Buildings, and Smarter Transportation. I also wanted to check out their data center infrastructure management (DCIM), but there’s only so much I could fit into the two days!

The Smarter Cities solutions coming out of IBM are compelling, to say the least (though undoubtedly, given the politics in public administration, a tough sale!). One of the better talks at the event was by Boston CIO, Bill Oates. Bill talked about, amongst other things, how Boston had rolled out a smartphone app for citizens to report when they saw a problem in the city (litter, pothole, graffiti, etc.).

When a report comes in from a smartphone, it is immediately placed in a word order, and a city employee is tasked with resolving it. The inclusion of photos and GPS coordinates in the report obviously help enormously in speeding up its resolution. When the issue is resolved, the person who reported is notified, and is told which city employee fixed it! This is a fantastic way of personalising the city government back to the people – social at its best. Boston are now adding some gamification features to the app as well to make it even more compelling.

When Bostonians were asked why they liked the app so much their response was that previously to report a problem, they had to ring the city hall, and that felt like they were complaining, whereas with the app they feel like they are part of the solution.


On the Smarter Buildings and Smarter Facilities front, it was great to see Tririga getting a lot of love at the event. We first wrote about Tririga here on GreenMonk back in 2009, and subsequently we wrote an email to several senior IBM execs introducing them to Tririga. It was nice to see them being acquired by IBM after that! Tririga is a suite of products designed to optimise use of a facilities portfolio. That can be done in any manner of diverse ways from identifying inefficient building stock in a portfolio of buildings, to simply spotting an open window in a building, and raising an alert.

Somewhat confusingly, as well as Tririga, IBM also has a Smarter Building Solutions group. This group works more on the buildings’ maintenance side of the house. This is vital for ensuring that buildings are running optimally at all times and minimising waste through downtime, or equipment failure.

In a similar vein, the IBM Smarter Transportation offerings from IBM make big use of what they call their Predictive Asset Optimisation (i.e. predictive maintenance). This is when the software analyses the (big) data coming from thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of sensors looking for anomalies. These exceptions, once identified can often be caused by a part going out of tolerance and needing a repair, or replacement. Obviously, finding this out ahead of time allows for replacement parts to be ordered in advance, and maintenance to be scheduled when it suits, as opposed to reacting when the equipment fails. There’s obviously a big safety story here too. Avoiding catastrophic failures in transportation is in everyone’s interest.

IBM isn’t branding these solutions as being sustainable, per se, but from what I’ve seen at Pulse, there’s no doubt in my mind that Smarter ≡ Sustainable.

Full disclosure – IBM paid travel and accommodation for me to attend this event.

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IBM’s Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities announcements

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Smart buildings are a topic I’m interested in and so I devote significant coverage to them on this blog. One of the reasons for that is that, for example, in the US alone, buildings are responsible for about 70% of the energy consumption and for about 40% of the greenhouse gases emitted and by 2025, buildings worldwide will become the largest consumer of global energy — more than transportation and the industrial sectors combined. Smarter buildings can help owners and operators cut energy use by as much as 40 percent and cut maintenance costs by 10 to 30 percent, according to IBM.

So why am I writing about Smarter Buildings again now?

Well, last week IBM launched its Intelligent Building Management software and refers to it as IBM’s “first advanced analytics software solution for Smarter Buildings”. To showcase its potential, IBM referenced three projects using the software:

  • Tulane University (as seen in the video above)
  • the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where IBM are helping the staff better control the environment to help with the preservation of the exhibits and
  • IBM’s Rochester Minnesota campus where the rollout of the software saw an already energy-efficient campus further reduce its energy consumption by 8%, according to IBM

Now while making software to make buildings more energy-efficient is pretty cool, IBM have seriously taken it up a notch by unveiling a software solution to make cities smarter. Called the Intelligent Operations Center for Smarter Cities this software is designed to help city officials to pull together data from divergent sources to help in the smoother running of cities.

IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smart Cities dashboard

IBM Intelligent Operations Center for Smart Cities

This is not new software, per se. What IBM have done is taken existing relevant software from its own portfolio, combined the bits (no pun) together and laid down an analytics layer on top. This re-use of code is in itself, a nice example of Green coding!

Over the next 12 months IBM intends to offer specific Operations Center modules for public safety, water, and transportation with tools to make it easier to connect IBM?s analytical engines with existing embedded systems:

However, I suspect that the biggest issue selling city-wide software solutions will be in identifying the buyer (and/or the data owner!). A lot of the information IBM is trying to incorporate into the Intelligent Operations Center will need to come from various data silos and political fiefdoms within city government.

Having said that, if anyone can make this market, it’s probably IBM.

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IBM’s Dave Bartlett on his vision for Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities

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I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities. I posted the first part of it yesterday – in today’s post, we discuss the future for Smarter Buildings and cities

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at IBM’s Pulse 2011 Conference. And with me I have IBM’s Dave Bartlett.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We talked earlier about the state-of-the-now with smart buildings and that kind of stuff, but where is all this going? Sure, right now we can see the energy information coming from buildings. What are we going to be doing with this kind of stuff in five, ten years time? Where is it all going?

Dave Bartlett: Well, that’s where it gets really exciting. I mean, we have talked about how there is opportunity today to save significant energy, but if you think about the bigger play, the smarter planet play, the smarter city play, buildings is a key building block for those plays.

I mean, every building has meters. So you can take advantage of the Smart Grid Initiatives as they become realized, not only to take advantage of different time of day based pricing, but also help the city cope with or prevent brownout conditions and make sure energy is available to the core infrastructure.

Tom Raftery: So you would have buildings participating in demand response programs automatically and shifting load and that kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: Exactly! I mean, if you are running a city, the key thing, you want to keep the traffic system up, you want to keep the hospitals up. Maybe you don’t care about running the pool pumps in the hotel pools as an impending brownout occurs, so that you can start to make tradeoffs like that.

So it turns out smarter buildings is a great building block to create the smarter city and do that with —

Another example is emergency response. Let’s say there is a building that’s on fire. If it’s connected to a smarter transportation system, the transportation can be rerouted away from that block so that the engines actually can get to the building and not be prevented from traffic from getting there as soon as they could be.

You could also automatically power off the buildings. You could possibly decrease water pressures in the surrounding areas to maximize water pressure in that area.

So it’s a combination of the smarter water system, the smarter transportation system, the smart grid system, working with a smart building system, to really increase the efficiency of your emergency response team in the city.

Tom Raftery: Okay. You mentioned another example earlier which fascinated me. It was around just taking in weather information.

Dave Bartlett: Right. So a lot of times we operate our buildings without any thought to what the weather is doing, but if a cold front is coming within the next hour or two hours, you could make decisions as to whether or not to turn the air conditioning on or turn it off in anticipation of that.

We are also implementing a lot more free air cooling, kind of getting back to the days when we used to open windows right? A big new idea [laughs]. So unbolt some of those windows.

So being able to forecast the weather, being aware of what’s happening in terms of humidity and temperature and turn off the air conditioning and start leveraging free air cooling, not just for office environments, but for manufacturing uses, for the big chilling towers, a huge opportunity to save energy.

You don’t want to be toggling these systems back and forth. If you are really tied in a close way to weather forecasting, even on an hourly basis, you can make really good decisions when to toggle between free air and the system. So just a much smarter way to run our buildings, our manufacturing plants, our offices.

Tom Raftery: So it seems like right now the state of the now in smarter buildings that we are looking inside and the state of the future is the buildings themselves will be looking outside.

Dave Bartlett: Looking outside, because the buildings will then become — each of them will become a participant in creating or building a smarter building.

I like to say, how do you get a smarter city, one smarter building at a time. So they can become the building blocks; building blocks for — actually smarter buildings can become new eco-cubes within the city. The eco-cubes can then populate to make the subsections of a city, and then the city as a whole. So it’s a little bit easier way to approach it.

Buildings are a natural connection point for the electric grid, for water, as transportation hubs, security, and video feeds. So it’s just a natural building block. So I see, we can get going today and then have all those connection points in place and all of a sudden realize a smarter city very quickly.

Tom Raftery: Awesome! Dave, thanks a million! Thanks for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

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IBM’s Dave Bartlett talking today’s Smarter Buildings

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I had a chat with IBM’s Dave Bartlett while we were both at at Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities today and their possibilities.

Here’s a transcription of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. I am here with Dave Bartlett. We are at IBM’s Pulse 2011 event.

Dave, you have become known as the Building Whisperer. We are talking about smarter buildings at the event quite a lot. It seems to be one of the focuses that IBM is looking at very strongly.

Is it all science fiction or is this kind of stuff that we can do today, or are we talking a year or two years? What’s the kind of time scale that we are looking at for this kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: No, it’s today, a very present possibility. When we stepped back and looked at what’s happened in the last decade, there has just been a rapid acceleration and proliferation of smart sensors. Every appliance going into buildings now has smart technology into it. So they are all emitting all these digital feeds. So that’s where the Building Whisperer comes in. There is all this data. If someone just really listens to it end-to-end, it’s amazing the opportunity we have today just to integrate into those systems and save energy.

Tom Raftery: Sure. But these buildings are emitting data, but I mean, how long is it going to take to actually get something out there that will be able to integrate all these feeds and present it to somebody?

Dave Bartlett: Okay. So when you look at it, they are emitting a lot of data from different equipment types. So there is different protocols to deal with, different networks to deal with. It’s a lot of data. That’s a second thing.

Third, it really does need an IT focus in addition to the building management skills, and that’s what IBM does so well. I was able to find technology that exists today off the shelf in IBM to really do the monitoring connection to the equipment, to do the data warehousing, to do the analytics, to build the dashboard, that technology all exists today. So it’s just a matter of connecting it and connecting it turns out is not a big deal.

Tom Raftery: So we can do it today. You are going to market with products for building managers to run buildings and global facilities?

Dave Bartlett: Absolutely! In fact, when I presented it to our Chairman, he said, well, this is great, take it market, but I want to start within IBM, which I thought was some great leadership.

So just within the past year we have implemented it, not only in our headquarters building, but in one of our biggest energy using sites, and it has already exceeded the base case in terms of savings and given 200% return on the investment.

Tom Raftery: Wow! I mean, what’s the kind of global marketplace for this kind of stuff?

Dave Bartlett: I mean, there are lots of different estimates, but there has been a study done by a Climate Group called SMART 2020 that said, if we do exactly what we are doing, apply existing communication and IT technology to the space, that we could save hundreds of billions of dollars in energy between now and the year 2020.

Tom Raftery: Okay. Dave, that’s great! Thanks a million for coming on the show!

Dave Bartlett: Thank you!

Disclosure – IBM sponsored this video and paid T&E for me to attend Pulse.

You should follow me on Twitter here

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I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home

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HP's Energy and Sustainability Management

Above is a screenshot of one of the slides from HP’s webinar announcing their new Energy and Sustainability Management solution.

What is most interesting about it for me is that, front and center there is a focus on Facilities and Buildings. We have already seen that IBM has identified Smarter Buildings as one of the major planks of its Smarter Planet program, now with HP chasing this sector as well, we are likely to see some major improvements in global building stock’s energy efficiency in the coming years.

It is nice to see HP re-discovering its interest in sustainability especially, since former CEO Mark Hurd eviscerated any programs related to sustainability in HP during his tenure. As my colleague James noted, the real legacy L?o Apotheker, HP’s new CEO, left SAP (where he was formerly CEO) is SAP’s deep commitment to sustainability. It looks like he is bringing his sustainability stamp to HP as well, but I digress.

As I noted in the post about IBM:

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions ? and then there is the market size to consider ? every building on the planet potentially.

Though there is one qualification to that – I suspect in the cases of both HP and IBM, when they refer to Smarter Buildings, they are primarily referring to commercial real estate, not residential buildings. This is understandable, given that the commercial market is a far easier one to address – a single contract can be for hundreds of thousands of square feet of real estate, whereas the residential sector, by definition, is far more fragmented. However, according to the IPCC, the residential sector is responsible for 1,500MtC of carbon emissions compared to 1,000MtC for commercial buildings.

How do we square this circle?

Well, one player addressing precisely this market is Living PlanIT. In their model city in Portugal, they are creating residential buildings which are net energy positive! They are also creating a platform for the development of sustainable urban technologies and licensing them so they can be used globally. I spoke recently to Living PlanIT’s CEO recently about their plans and will be writing that up in a separate post.

However, the takeaway is that, while the commercial market is a hugely important one to address, it really is the low hanging fruit in terms of the global built environment’s energy footprint. We need to be actively chasing the residential space, at least as vigorously as the commercial one.

I want one of those cute energy dashboards IBM and HP are touting for my home. When we all have one of those, then we’ll have made some real progress.

Photo credit Tom Raftery

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IBM Pulse and Smarter Buildings/Smarter Cities

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Mike Rhodin, IBM SVP, talking Smarter Cities at IBM Pulse

I attended IBM’s Pulse conference last week and the big surprise for me was the amount of attention being paid to Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities. With 600+ sessions over six parallel tracks it is only to be expected that there be some Smarter Building content but at this event Smarter Buildings and Smarter Cities were mentioned in most of the keynotes. The Smarter Buildings market has obviously been identified by IBM as one to chase.

IBM also timed two related press releases to coincide with the event – in the first IBM talk about how they worked with McMaster University to improve the energy supply and use in its 60 campus-wide buildings and a university hospital. In the second announcement IBM released the names of several cities it is working with on Smarter Cities initiatives (Washington D.C., Wilmington, N.C. and Waterloo, Ontario).

Smarter Buildings are obviously a big play what with buildings being responsible for anything up to 40% of the world?s energy use, and approximately 33% of the world?s greenhouse gas emissions – and then there is the market size to consider – every building on the planet potentially.

Buildings are complex animals and they are not exactly dumb today – so how do we go about making them smarter? Most buildings have many disparate data sources (lights, heating, aircon, running equipment, doors, lifts, etc.). Where the likes of IBM can help is in pulling all this information together into a single window, and allowing building managers to view the information in context. IBM then layers its analytics on top of the information to show trends in energy use, highlight problems, as well as helping forecast and optimise energy consumption.

Similarly, but on an even bigger scale, IBM is helping cities manage their systems. Everything from traffic congestion and lighting optimisation, right the way through to water use optimisation and first responder call outs can be managed electronically right now. Again these systems have lots of disparate data – but it is in consolidating this data that IBM excels. Right now they are working with cities on individual projects around things like water use and traffic but look out for announcements soon from IBM on a product for the management of entire cities. That’ll be one to get really excited about!

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Photo credit Tom Raftery