By Harry Forbes, ARC Advisory Group
Cisco’s announcement yesterday of its Smart Connected Buildings initiative is a watershed event. What Cisco is releasing is actually a standards-based building SCADA system that integrates and adds intelligence to existing building systems. Most of the Smart Grid commentariat has missed this point entirely. Cisco is enabling its channel partners and customers to serve as energy system integrators. It is also a hint about the approach Cisco may take for enabling the future Smart Grid and eventually the smart home.
Much of the Smart Grid hype has glossed over the integration of IT and building systems as if this integration was a trivial matter. It isn’t. It’s a business, and a big one. Installed building automation technology and systems are very expensive and thus difficult to displace. The promoters of ZigBee technology wrongly expected ZigBee networking to dominate building automation in just a few years. It didn’t happen, of course. Building systems and their channels to market proved far too sticky.
Yesterday’s announcement of the Cisco Network Building Mediator showed that Cisco’s strategy is not to displace but rather to facilitate existing building systems in becoming IT-enabled. Then Cisco will provide tools to monitor and improve performance. This type of integration leverages the existing building and enterprise IP networks. The scope of integration extends across all the major building systems: HVAC, lighting, access, and security.
The new building Mediator is the fruit of Cisco’s recent acquisition of Richard-Zeta Building Intelligence, along with the incubation of this acquisition at Cisco’s Globalization Center East in Bangalore. The Mediator collects data from the building’s energy systems using various vendor and open protocols. Then the Mediator normalizes the data to a common representation. Higher level applications report on and operate on this common representation, which results in communication back to the proprietary building systems. One of these applications is web-based graphical programming software for creating supervisory automation applications (see figure).
This type of capability will bring Cisco into increased competition with its partner’s products. Similar integration platforms have been on the market for some time. The Niagara platform of Tridium, which was acquired by Honeywell 3 years ago is quite similar. Like Niagara, the Mediator supports a large number of drivers to equipment and systems from suppliers like ABB, Schneider Electric, Johnson Controls, and Trane, in addition to supporting the MODBUS and BACnet protocols.
In this respect, Cisco is now in a battle for the hearts and minds of end users, but especially of channel partners. True to form, Cisco’s announcement included plans for an Authorized Technology Provider Program for its channel partners. Among Cisco’s competitive advantages are 1) global reach, 2) ability to leverage its near-ubiquitous installed base, and 3) deep experience in training its channel.
This announcement also ties in neatly to the Smart Grid. Cisco’s customer reference, NetApp, had used the system to implement a Demand Response capability. Demand response is the raison d’être for the Smart Grid, so it’s a small step from applying this technology widely in commercial buildings to having a sizable demand response capability. The bigger step will be developing expert and responsive channels to bring the product to market, apply it, and service it.
Did somebody just say “stimulus”?