Intelligent Buildings : Solutions For Intelligent Buildings

Almost every corporate building, mall, residential complex, hos­pital,
school, college or SEZ built today can be intelligent and managed intelligently.
This is possible through Building Manage­ment Systems (BMS), which has tightly
integrated mechanical as well as electrical systems that do everything from
controlling the buildings, environment, lighting, security, maintaining servers,
high speed networks and power operations. The BMS incorporated in a building
saves energy while increasing reliability, security and efficiency. They can
detect and repair a malfunc­tioning part of the building or its services and
avoid serious consequences including a fire.

BMS can monitor, control and optimize services such as lights, security,
heating, alarm, access control, ventilation, air-conditioning, computer systems,
secure the networks and manage data centers.

The Integrated Building Management System (IBMS) is a single unit, which
embraces within its fold all the core systems and installations of a building to
form a centralized control system. The central architecture is configured as a
local area network with the central workstation and control units for HVAC,
lighting, security and life safety as the nodes. Communication between them is
established by the use of common protocols like TCP/IP. Studies have shown that
putting an IBMS in a facility has an impact of reducing operating costs by
nearly 10 to 20 percent over what could have been- without compromising on
quality.

Ingredients of BMS

BMS is a combination of different solu­tions controlled centrally by a
single system. Some of the most common solutions incorporated in BMS include,
energy and asset management solution, surveillance, perimeter surveil­lance,
intrusion detection, access control, public addressal system, alarm control,
fire safety (detection, prevention), under vehicle surveillance and baggage
screening to name a few.

Tarun Ramrakhiani, Regional Marketing Leader-India and Middle East, Honeywell
Building Solutions feels that the buildings built today are incorporating
technology within it. “Today's office buildings are no longer the plain vanilla
office spaces of a few years ago. The latest trend these days is to have
'intelligent buildings' which have IBMS. This system basically comprises systems
for comfort-air condi­tioning and quality control; systems for safety-fire alarm
systems; fire suppression systems, public address systems; systems for
security-access control system, video survei­llance system, asset tracking
system,” said Ramrakhiani.

“IBMS is essentially connec­ting various services in a building like HVAC,
plumbing, fire fighting, lighting, lifts and elevators and the safety and
security elements like fire alarm systems, access control and CCTV solutions on
a common platform for opti­mized opera­tions. Its importance in buildings is
growing by the day as the biggest expenses in commercial buildings are the power
bill followed by man­power costs. Both of these are optimized by IBMS systems,”
said Sameer Nagpal, CEO, Zicom Electronic Security Systems.

Vendors in BMS

There are many vendors involved in this space. For an instance, the video
surveillance solutions are provided by vendors like Zicom, Voltas, Bosch,
Honeywell, HCL Security Systems. In the BMS front there are companies like
Honeywell, Sauter AG. There are also companies like Emerson, Kaba, Legic,
Nordmann Engineering who provide diffe­rent solutions in different areas such as
power, temperature control, engi­nee­ring to name a few verticals.

Honeywell is among the market leaders in the BMS space, which has an entire
gamut of solutions.

Cisco provides a solution called Connected Real Estate, which is basically a
framework that positions the “Network as the Platform”, and is aimed at
facilitating the transformation of the real estate industry. Connected Real
Estate benefits the key stakeholders of a property, namely owners, operators and
users.

“The network becomes an intelligent building infrastructure and this
intelligent building infrastructure creates an unpre­cedented opportunity for
impro­ved services, enhanced processes, and cost-effective operations for
everyone who uses or creates buildings, worldwide. It also addresses the needs
of a business by creating a robust and agile network that offers high-speed
building-wide Internet access, thereby enhancing mobility,” said R Dhamodaran,
Sr VP-Channel Operations and Commercial Strategy, Cisco, India and SAARC

Cisco works with a set of partners to provide its Connected Real Estate
Program called the Industry Solutions Partner Network (ISPN), which includes
their solution-specific partners. These engage­ments are typically long-term and
help Cisco to build a strong relationship based on imple­men­ting of solutions
rather than products alone. There are also attractive financial rewards for ISPN
partners under their Solution Incentive Program (SIP). Some of the partners with
whom Cisco works include Percipia Networks, MagiNet, Intermec, Nomadix,
IPCelerate, and Psion Teklogix.

There are persistent inno­vations happening in the BMS space, where vendors
like Honeywell have innovated in creating smart centralized applications that
bring these systems together and interlink them for better energy consum­ption
and facilities management. Adding to that the systems can be integrated into
enterprise systems (ERP) for better business intelligence. For example HR
applications such as time and attendance monitoring, payroll processing etc can
be based on access control systems.

Market for BMS

The demand for IBMS and Building Automation Systems (BAS) has emerged due to
the increasing need to reduce operational and maintenance costs by creating
energy-efficient and centrally monitored and controlled systems that give
organizations the much needed flexibility, scalability, security, convenience,
comfort and of course good RoI. For security systems such as Electronic Access
Control Systems (EACS), growth has been mainly due to their cost effectiveness
in the segments such as small offices and manufacturing firms and educational
institutions and lately the IT/ITeS sector. In case of video surveillance the
growth of different applications such as public area surveillance, traffic
monitoring, process monitoring, remote site monitoring, supple­menting access
control and non security applications like fire protection are factors that
contribute to increased deploy­ment. After the 26/11 terror attacks experts feel
that the scope for video surveillance will improve further.

(courtesy: Honeywell Building Solutions)

According to Frost and Sullivan, India is viewed as one of the fastest
growing markets wherein end-user growth, growing awareness and afforda­bility
are creating huge market opportunities both at low and high ends of the market.
“Growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27 percent, the Indian
Building Technology (BT) market is expec­ted to reach $1,293 million by 2012.
IBMS and BAS are anticipated to witness good growth during 2007-2012. In 2012,
IBMS and BAS would be 25.2 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively, of the total
BT market,” said a report from Frost and Sullivan.

“Today the real estate developers are more aware of the rising energy costs
and manpower costs that come out of manning complex and diverse services. We
have seen that the adoption to IBMS is much higher today than about two years
ago as more and more office buildings, malls are going in for the IBMS
solutions,” said Nagpal, of Zicom.

Role and scope for SIs

There are too many system integrators involved in offering BMS. Many SIs
involved in this space refuse to divulge details about their offerings citing
the competition as reason. Some of the prominent SIs in this arena include
Allied Digital, Sauterrace, Spectral Services, Firepro Systems and companies
like Honeywell, Voltas, Zicom and Cisco also offer BMS to the real estate
sector.

The scope for SIs are high in BMS, as they are the ones who drive the segment
by enabling an end-to-end IT infrastructure in the building taking solutions
from the vendors through various partnerships. “Today IP is emerging as the most
effective and reliable communication mode. This holds true for IBMS as well. A
host of products are available today that are compatible for IP communi­cations
and most system architectures are built on the IP backbone. It is this synergy
between the BMS solution provider and IT integrator that will grow in the days
to come,” opined Nagpal of Zicom.

He claimed that Zicom historically has been an SI that has used state of the
art technology products from various companies and brands in the solutions it
has offered to its customers. “This experience has given us a keen understanding
of exact needs of the customers in products. It helped us to introduce Zicom
branded products into the Indian market that is tailor made to suit the Indian
customer. We do have some partnerships with select SIs. We are open and welcome
potential partners both in our SI and product selling business,” Nagpal said.

SIs will play a vital role in BT, as the market is shifting from being
product-centric to solution-based integrated systems with high levels of
customization, concluded Tarun Ramrakhiani of Honeywell.

NR Sethuraman

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in