I had a chat with some of IBM’s partners – Eaton‘s Dave Davidson and Tridium‘s Marc Petock, at IBM Pulse 2011 about the state of Smarter Buildings, and Smarter Cities today and the requirement for collaboration to achieve their possibilities. Unfortunately I messed up the setup of the camera cutting off my head from most of the chat – but on the other hand, that’s probably a good thing!

And here’s the 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 two IBM partners; Marc Petock from Tridium and Dave Davidson from Eaton Corporation.

Now, guys, we have been talking a lot at this event about smarter buildings. Why are you guys involved in smarter buildings? Another kind of theme that has come up at the event has been around collaboration. Why is that important? Dave, I will ask you first.

Dave Davidson: Absolutely! Thanks for inviting me. Smarter building design, deployment, development, and implementation, requires a collaborative effort among many of the different disciplines to actually make a building perform as necessary. So you have the design engineering. You have the controls equipment. You have the monitoring equipment. You have the commissioning of the building and specification equipment and just implementing the whole facility. That needs to be a collaborative effort among many different companies to make this occur.

It’s too big of an effort for any one company to do it all alone. So that’s why we have a collaborative effort.

Tom Raftery: What part of that are Eaton involved in?

Dave Davidson: Eaton’s collaborative effort is around the energy engineering and design and development of the high performance green building and also providing the equipment to power the building.

Tom Raftery: And Marc, Tridium, what are Tridium involved in?

Marc Petock: Tridium is involved in making the technology that links all the different systems and the disparate pieces of equipment in a building to connect and talk to one another. So that they can collaborate with each other and all the different systems within that building, from HVAC, to lighting, to digital signage, to irrigation, to truly make all the systems run as one functional family.

Tom Raftery: So somebody managing the facility can see information from all these systems in one pane?

Marc Petock: In one pane, absolutely, anytime, anywhere, from a PDA, to a centralized command and control center, to individual sites whenever they want to. So they can actually go in and look at the HVAC system and see how the security system is affecting the HVAC system based on occupancy for example.

Tom Raftery: Okay. How far are we from being able to control devices using these kind of panes from reacting to alerts from a screen?

Marc Petock: We are not far at all. You can do it today. We are here today to be able to do that. With cooperation amongst — as my colleague Dave said here, it is a collaborative effort. People like Eaton, Tridium, Johnson, Honeywell, IBM, we are all making sure that this happens and that technology and those systems exist today.

Tom Raftery: And Dave, I mean, how big is this? What kind of market are we talking about? Is this like one or two buildings that might need it, or is it multiple orders of magnitude of that, or what kind of scale are we talking about for this?

Dave Davidson: I think when you ask about how big it is, I think what we have to consider is, it is the built environment. So existing buildings today can absolutely be improved if you have a plan of attack. So you have to create the energy plan.

So I would say that almost all of the built environment has the opportunity to become a smarter building, reduce energy consumption, reduce greenhouse gases, increase operating profit, and increase the comfortability of actually working in that building. So the size of the marketplace is all existing buildings.

Tom Raftery: That’s a big market.

Dave Davidson: Very big.

Tom Raftery: Okay, gentlemen, thanks a million for coming on the show!

Marc & Dave: Thank you for having us!

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

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