Buildings With Brains
Barbizon/63 is no ordinary condominium complex. It's luxurious, yes, and the design in some ways is extra rich: Several units feature spacious terraces surrounded by brick and sandstone arches. Others showcase 14-foot-high rosette windows. But even those tony decorative touches aren't exactly what sets this complex apart from others of its ilk.
Here's the kicker: Residents of this upscale property on the Upper East Side of Manhattan can use an IP telephone and touch screen to control lighting, play music and raise the temperature in their units. That's because the complex runs a single IP-based network for building-management systems and IT.
This is no sci-fi movie set. It's the future of real estate—and where VARs need to be if they want to avoid extinction and evolve into 21st-century technology providers.
While most "smart construction" hotspots bubble abroad, in such exotic locales as Singapore and Tokyo, the concept is merely simmering here in the United States. But a handful of organizations are trying to bring this domestic pot to a boil.
"Think about an office building. You've got networked computers, servers, printers," says Jim Young, co-founder and producer at Realcomm, a San Diego-based trade group for the commercial real-estate industry. "Now look around. Look at the lights, the doors, the locks, the [emergency] sprinklers. Imagine the opportunity that comes with networking all of that. Where you had 20 or so IP addresses before, you now have thousands of them."
Intelligent Buildings, a 3-year-old company in Charlotte, N.C., has been looking at things in just that way. Co-founder Tom Shircliff hails from the IT world, having spent 14 years as a VAR, but the company he's with now is a hybrid, something between an engineering/design firm and a solution provider.
"The fact I come from IT should send a very strong message to VARs. There's a huge and growing marketplace in multitenant, commercial real estate," Shircliff says. "There's 8 billion square feet of undeveloped space [in that market] and 300 million more square feet being developed every year. Nobody needs to panic about the door of opportunity being closed and bolted."
NEXT: What VARs do need to concern themselves with.
ALSO: Download our blueprint of a smart building (PDF).
What traditional VARs do need to concern themselves with is learning how to navigate the real-estate landscape. In this terrain, the culture is different, and so are the lexicon, the psychology and, perhaps most important, the meaning of ROI, say Shircliff and his partner at Intelligent Buildings, Rob Murchison.
"If you took an X-ray of a 'dumb' building, you'd see maybe a dozen separate IP infrastructures in there, from temperature control to security and lighting, all talking the same talk," Murchison says. "But don't jump the gun and start a conversation with a building owner or construction company by talking IP packets and switches. You'll lose them."
VARs need to understand that people in the real-estate field tend to be risk- and technology-averse, Shircliff says. As far as most builders are concerned, they need to give the customer four walls, a roof and a riser. That's it. And building owners measure success very differently than corporate end users. Their lingo doesn't include speeds and feeds; it's about savings-per-square-foot and cash-on-cash return.
Intelligent Buildings partners with Cisco Systems, whose Connected Real Estate (CCRE) framework forms the basis of the vendor's "smart" initiatives, to make the intersection between IT and building automation a reality. The tenet underlying their real-estate solutions is the Fourth Utility infrastructure.
"First there was gas, then water and electricity," Shircliff says. "For something to be a utility, it has to be essential, reliable and commoditized. Now there's a fourth, and it's communications."
One of their projects is Ballantyne Village, a shopping center like no other--at least in the United States. This consumer mecca in Charlotte consists of 800 square feet of retail shops, restaurants and a movie theater. Hotel and office space is on the way.
Digital plasma displays tantalize visitors with ads for food and drink; the property owner can boot up his laptop and dim the lighting on the property's fountains with a click of the mouse.
Intelligent Buildings, along with Stalwart Systems and the Signature Group (also Cisco partners) deployed the Ballantyne network infrastructure using Cisco's Service-Oriented Network Architecture framework. The property's fiber-optic connections terminate in a main data center, and the Cisco Unified Wireless solution consists of 100-plus Cisco Aironet Wireless Access points. Village employees and tenants use Cisco IP phones to make and receive calls, and Cisco VPN Connectors let staffers and tenants connect remotely to the network.
"Cisco is putting [IT and real estate] together in a programmatic way, with case studies and ecosystems," Shircliff says. And while other IT vendors, such as Microsoft and IBM, have been sniffing around the topic of "smart" buildings, nobody has caught the scent just yet.
"Cisco is talking to people and showing them that systems convergence is here," says Ray Rapuano, a strategic account manager for real estate and construction at Cisco. "This is the direction of the future. We want all building-systems companies to come out with products that hang off of the Cisco [framework] that powers office buildings."
The networking king has certainly gotten its way at Barbizon/63, where a Cisco IP network forms the system backbone. One prominent Cisco partner behind the scenes at the housing complex was ShoreGroup, a New York-based solution provider.
"There's one network here that handles IP video surveillance, lighting, HVAC [heating, ventilation, air-conditioning], digital signage and music—everything," says Carl Gambello, director of Advanced Automation at ShoreGroup and a former employee of Cisco. "And we're just scratching the tip of the iceberg."
NEXT: More intelligent structures in the United States.
ALSO: Download our blueprint of a smart building (PDF).
Other "intelligent" U.S. structures include One America Plaza in San Diego; Alegent Health Lakeside Hospital in Omaha, Neb.; and the Tacoma Financial Center in Tacoma, Wash.
One America, a 600,000-square-foot commercial-office building in San Diego, has a fiber-optic backbone and complete Wi-Fi coverage. The obelisk-shaped structure, which offers a view of the San Diego skyline and greets entrants with a marble-and-granite atrium, was owned and managed by Sentre Partners until earlier this year, when the property was purchased by The Irvine Co. Matt Spathas, a Sentre partner, is one driving force behind the "smart" movement, along with Gambello, Shircliff and Young.
Yet those projects are dwarfed by the likes of Cyberport, a $2 billion hub in Hong Kong consisting of about 1 million square feet of office space, a 300,000-square-foot shopping and entertainment complex, a 173-room hotel and a residential development. The campus sports a water-cooled chiller plant, sun-shading devices with automatic blinds, speed escalators, a fiber-optic network and omnipresent wireless connectivity. Other "smart" projects in Asia include the Aurora Building in Shanghai, China; Digital Media City in Seoul, South Korea; and Roppongi Hills in Tokyo.
Industry watchers say Asia is the epicenter of "smart" real-estate innovation. There you'll see ubiquitous cities rising from the ground, where living quarters, retail centers and transportation systems run on consolidated IP networks—where, say, a digital display at a bus stop or train station might inform you that the next ride is slated to arrive in 2 minutes, 40 seconds.
"Go to China and take a look at what they're doing with technology in their cities, in their education systems," Young says. "They're preparing for the 21st century, while we're still busy managing every penny from the 20th."
It's solution providers, among others, that need to start turning that complacency on its head. But they have some work to do in terms of finding the right partners and customers, and fine-tuning their sales pitch.
"The potential clients [VARs] should be going after are construction and facility managers, and building owners," says Jim Sinopoli, principal of Sinopoli and Associates, an engineering and consulting firm in Spicewood, Texas. (See "Get 'Smart,'" page 36.) "They have to say, 'This is how the technology is evolving, and this is how much less it'll cost you to build the structure as a smart one.'"
Adds Robert Gay, senior consultant at East Greenwich, R.I.-based Broad Reach, a technology consultancy: "The value a solution provider brings is that most real-estate people aren't high-tech. There's typically no IT person at a real-estate firm, unless you're talking about a REIT [Real Estate Investment Trust], and even then, there are probably just a few."
There's another key to becoming successful in "smart" real estate, according to Murchison. That's offering integrated, cogent solutions. If you specialize in network switches only, get together with a VAR that deploys servers.
"It takes time to assemble all the pieces, so VARs might want to try partnering with their peers first," he says. "They should also team up with companies in the building-systems space—Lutron and Johnson Controls, for example. Craft your own value proposition and take a methodical approach."
Realcomm's Young points out that there's always a decent amount of legwork involved—chiefly networking and research—when someone goes from being a generalist to a specialist in a vertical niche. "There are lots of potholes for a little bit of gold," he says.
One of the deepest potholes is not qualifying prospective customers, Young adds. "Don't try to sell a [smart building] to the client. If you have to convince them, you're going in the wrong direction," he says. "The focus shouldn't be on going to the big clients with deep pockets. It should be on finding customers with the right mind-set, the ones who really get it."
NEXT: Get 'smart' -- intelligent buildings spell opportunity for VARs.
ALSO: Download our blueprint of a smart building (PDF).
Sidebar: Get 'Smart'
If you've installed a data network, VoIP or an IP video surveillance system, you already have many of the skills needed to integrate all of the technology systems that go into a "smart" building.
What the data, voice and IP video systems have in common is that they use structured cabling and the IP protocol; also, the associated servers, SQL databases and systems-administration tools can be managed via the Web.
Other building technology systems include access and lighting control, video distribution, audio-visual, automation and power management. Traditionally, those systems used a variety of cabling, communications protocols, databases and management tools, many of which have been proprietary. But this is changing with the emergence of structured cabling and open protocols. Today, many of those systems network their field controllers through Category 6 copper or standard fiber-optic cable, and use IP. Video-distribution systems are rapidly evolving to broadcasting and media retrieval via IPTV.
There are two drivers behind smart buildings. One is technology; the other is economics. Integrated systems are less expensive to install and operate. It takes less time to train staff, the life-cycle cost of the systems is lower, and the value of the building increases.
What does all of this spell for traditional VARs? Opportunity, with a capital "o."
Jim Sinopoli is the principal of Sinopoli and Associates, an engineering and consulting firm in Spicewood, Texas. For more information about his book, Smart Buildings: A Handbook For The Design And Operation of Building Technology Systems, visit www.smart-buildings.com.