Imagine you’re a real estate asset owner or manager, and you’ve got some hypersensitive tenants in your commercial building whose staff, let’s say, are quick to complain about the conditions. It’s not unusual.
Many corporates are trying desperately to woo their staff back to the office, and the staff know it; if they’re going to leave the comfort of their homes, they expect the very best environment to work from.
They want brilliant air quality and perfect airconditioning temperatures. Many also want excellent environmental outcomes because they have a value system that cares about the planet and the carbon pollution going into the atmosphere.
Then there’s energy.
This ticks both environmental and financial metrics, which of course ping straight back to the asset owner’s books and is critical in the current energy crisis.
Investors – and now government – also demand accurate climate related disclosures.
So, a building management systems (BMS) needs to be sensitive and timely.
But this is not always easy when there’s often a morass of interwoven software systems applied one on top of the other over many years.
That’s where Bob Sharon’s company Encompass Blue steps in.
Bob comes from a deep background in building technology and has spent years absorbing the challenges and finding solutions for his customers.
He’s launched Encompass Blue, a platform that meets these tough and uncompromising demands.
In a nutshell, Encompass Blue is a smart building platform that gives asset managers high visibility over their property portfolio’s performance.
It cuts through the noise of competing or conflicting software to provide a clear view, whether it’s from someone’s API (application programming interface), other databases or a bunch of sensors on site.
“It monitors for energy, water, waste – all those elements that measure the indirect quality of your building,” he tells us in this deep dive learning video-podcast with The Fifth Estate to unpack the structure and value of Encompass Blue.
So, what does Bob say are the biggest challenges that his business can solve for?
One word might just sum it up: interoperability.
Thing is, there is no shortage of software systems and sensors that have been added to buildings and portfolios, often layer upon layer over many years.
But do these systems connect? Do they “talk” to each other and provide a cohesive, actionable plan of action to encourage better results from a behemoth of a property asset?
Bob says interoperability is “easier said than done. There are a lot of people that claim to have that.”
But the truth of the matter is that there’s “a lot” of building management systems that are proprietary and “are very hard to communicate with”.
Typically, buildings have multiple BMS systems, energy management systems and lighting systems, Bob says.
“In many cases, they don’t talk to each other, or if they do, it’s very limited, and trying to get the data is challenging.
“In some cases, the client doesn’t even own the data. I’ve heard of stories where clients have had to pay the vendor to access their own data.
“What we endeavour to do is to pick up data, even off old systems, and there are ways and means that that can be done and then bring everything into a unified platform. Because when we have a unified platform, we can at least visualise the data. We can see it, we can manage it, because we can’t manage what we don’t know.”
And cracking open proprietary systems “hiding behind a black box” can be very hard.
In other cases, Bob says, there’s not much data at all, and more needs to be added to run systems such as the HVAC.
Bob favours open source systems, such as Tridium’s Niagara BMS, which is what Encompass Blue has standardised with.
Amazon Web Services certainly appreciates his work. “They tell us our competitive advantage is we can provide the turnkey from end to end without going to five different vendors.”
His company also has an eye on helping the entire system.
Working with universities and research institutions
Right now, his company is working with the Queensland University of Technology and ThriveIAQ to bring world leading research for the built environment to the general marketplace.
The “very user centric” work will feature strong visualisation to help asset managers mitigate the risk of bad health caused by indoor quality failure.
It’s all part of helping to make “people’s lives easier and provide the data and interpret the data to provide real insights that can be converted basically into gold and silver and diamonds in the form of better sustainability, better health outcomes.”
That’s the win-win that Bob loves.
