by Varun Nagaraj, President and CEO of Sierra Monitor Corporation
One of this season’s best selling gifts is the Amazon Echo with Alexa. Plug it in and Echo / Alexa will run your house for you: turning on lights, locking / unlocking doors, catering to your family member’s unique climate comfort needs, and reducing your energy bill – all voice activated and without any hard-core programming. If you haven’t tried it, you should. It’s cool. But if you are part of the Facility Management or Building Automation and Controls community, like I am, the Echo / Alexa will also make you and all members of our community feel old, unimaginative, and so last century. We are the dads that wear sweaters and “dad jeans”, and justify our lack of fashion sense by claiming that we are just being responsible.
Consider the venerable Building Management System (BMS). Perhaps only 20% of all the commercial real estate in the United States is managed by a BMS because the rest of the market is too small or unsophisticated to be able to handle a BMS. So a debate rages on as to how to bring the “power of the BMS” to the other 80%. And it’s not like the 20% that has a BMS is thanking their lucky stars either.
Adding new functions to a BMS isn’t easy. Opening up BMS access to system manufacturers and integrators, who legitimately need to have real-time access to their data that is locked in the BMS is difficult. Extracting the required data for analysis from the BMS is no picnic. Facility managers therefore complain about being held hostage by their BMS vendor. So in the midst of all this hand-wringing, let us pause for a second and consider my not specially talented 12 year old nephew who set up his mother’s Alexa and essentially created his “home BMS” in less than an hour; making his home instantly more managed, controlled, safe, and energy-efficient than at least 80% of commercial real estate.