- Your buildings have a lot to tell but you need the right technologies to understand them, says Netix CEO
- The need of the hour is to replace siloed and decentralised building operations with a centralised, cloud-enabled model that offers deep-dive visibility across all systems, easy to monitor, manage and optimise.
- While software-only platforms can lead to considerable savings, the impact can be enhanced with greater hardware-software interplay.
For the uninitiated, buildings are merely structures designed to shelter their inhabitants, which can be people, animals or inanimate objects.
For smart building solutions providers, facility managers, energy service companies (ESCOs), and regulatory bodies, these structures mean a lot more.
An ESCO sees old buildings as energy guzzlers in need of optimisation; a facility manager sees systems such as HVAC, surveillance, and lighting, which need manual attention.
For smart building solutions providers, the objective is to ensure their one-stop-shop solutions can address multiple issues in old stock and simultaneously unlock several positive results.
Sanjeevv Bhatia, CEO of Netix Controls, in an interview, said that buildings are much more than what meets the eye and “it is only when you are equipped with the right technologies that you can scratch beneath the surface.”
What are some of the challenges plaguing buildings? And why is it important to acknowledge and address these challenges?
In leading economies, a vast majority of buildings are already a decade or two old. This means they are riddled with legacy, multi-vendor systems that have become inefficient, energy-intensive, and heavy on the OpEx, but not easily replaceable due to proprietary protocols.
So, if you are an owner or an operator, your chances of optimising such systems are limited to expensive upgrades. But that still leaves much to be desired in terms of holistic optimisation and interoperability of systems. This arises due to multiple vendors and vendor-specific lock-ins, which creates silos.
As a result, a vast amount of usable data in a building portfolio remains unanalysed. When an issue crops up, operators are not well equipped to diagnose it proactively and initiate redressal action.
Can we, then, be surprised to know that buildings are responsible for 40 per cent of global energy consumption and at least one-third of global GHG emissions?
If you do not have data-driven insights on the building’s energy consumption, you are in the dark. At a time when climate change is nearing the tipping point, addressing such challenges, therefore, becomes mission-critical.
What is the first order of business when it comes to addressing buildings’ increased energy consumption, inefficiencies, and sub-optimal performances? Where does technology come in?
Firstly, we need to acknowledge the buildings’ Right to Repair. This movement, which once swept consumer electronics, was largely driven by the advent of technologies.
We need to arrive at a consensus that buildings, too, should have the power to accommodate innovations and adapt as per evolving needs — which has been hampered due to vendors who do not accommodate integrations with other systems and without whose assistance you cannot undertake maintenance/repair.
Such dependencies are unsustainable, expensive, and restrictive. This can change with the greater adoption of open-protocol technologies and solutions.
Explain the open-protocol framework, associated technologies, and how they can address the aforementioned challenges in buildings.
Simply put, an open-protocol framework is devoid of proprietary protocols. At Netix, we call it the “Android Approach” because it behaves like the Android OS, which is open-source, easy to operate on, and more accommodative to new value additions and innovations.
The objective is to enable building stakeholders to retrofit existing BMS with plug-and-play solutions that can eliminate vendor lock-ins and integrate siloed systems.
This way, owners needn’t make high-capital investments for the procurement of state-of-the-art systems but retain existing ones and still unlock “smart” outcomes.
This is possible due to the smart retrofit’s IoT and AI capabilities, which perform vendor-agnostic integration, to eliminate proprietary protocols, enable adaptive maintenance of existing BMS systems, and reduce resource usage while simultaneously enhancing operational efficiencies.
When you replace siloed and decentralised building operations with a centralised, cloud-enabled model that offers deep-dive visibility across all systems, you can monitor, manage, and optimize at ease.
What are the implications for all stakeholders? Please elaborate on the multi-fold value that IoT and AI applications in buildings can unlock.
The open-protocol transition has wide-ranging implications for asset and vendor management, workforce productivity, savings, occupant/tenant experiences and, most importantly, the building’s sustainability.
The promise of IoT and AI applications in any industry or domain is higher efficiency. The same goes for building operations — you can replace laborious operations and reactive maintenance with features such as auto fault detection and diagnosis, centralised control, insight-led energy management, end-user customisable condition-based alerts, etc.
While software-only platforms can lead to considerable savings, the impact can be enhanced with greater hardware-software interplay. This is the rationale behind our Novus Partner Program, where synergistic solutions from software and hardware providers lead to greater savings.
We have registered a 50 per cent reduction in both OpEx and skilled-labour requirements while avoiding system breakdowns by 80 per cent. These figures are based on a number of our case studies.
Name a few case studies, successful projects and client wins. What is the road ahead for the company?
Netix Controls and ODS Global’s hardware-software solutions best represent our work. Leading developer Emaar achieved substantial savings through an IoT-led software platform, but unlocked greater savings through ODS Global’s vendor-agnostic BMS maintenance and integrations.
Our portfolio also includes maintenance of BMS of 24 towers of DAMAC (pleased with the services and unprecedented savings and positive outcomes, DAMAC has increased the contract to 30 towers this year); upgrading of additional warranties and maintenance in Mazaya Towers, enabling 75 per cent savings in CapEx; seamless integration of 77 buildings of Etisalat, all branches of an esteemed bank in the UAE, Kings College Hospital as well as Emarat Headquarters.