December 2011
Interview

AutomatedBuildings.com

Innovations in Comfort, Efficiency, and Safety Solutions.
Belimo

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Joe NoworatzkyEMAIL INTERVIEW - Joe Noworatzky and Ken Sinclair

Joe Noworatzky, Vice President,
Engineering,
Building Technology, and Services Line of Business, Building Efficiency,
Johnson Controls Inc.
Joe.H.Noworatzky@jci.com

Joe is responsible for worldwide engineering product and system development and program management. His team develops products for Building Energy Management Systems, Building Automation Systems, Wireless, Sensors and actuators, and refrigeration control devices.



Johnson Controls Panoptix™ Solution

Collecting data from disparate building systems and creating a single, integrated view of building and system performance.


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Sinclair: The Panoptix™ solution was launched at Greenbuild this year – please tell me more about it.

Noworatzky: This is a complete solution – a combination of software and services that more easily and cost effectively helps customers achieve optimized building performance and energy efficiency. 

Featuring an open-platform, cloud-hosted application suite and an intuitive user experience, the solution simplifies what traditionally has been a very complex process by collecting data from disparate building systems and creating a single, integrated view of building and system performance. The applications and advanced analytics provide actionable insight, allowing customers to identify ways to achieve increased levels of energy savings and building performance optimization.

Applications are delivered through a subscription-based model. This gives building owners and operators the flexibility to select only the applications most critical for their needs, alleviates the need to access capital to get started and makes the solution more readily accessible to a very broad set of customers.

The platform and application suite are complemented with new support services: Live Guide support and Connected Community.  These new offers work hand in hand with the existing portfolio of Johnson Controls building and energy management services to implement the performance and energy improvement measures identified through the use of Panoptix applications.

Sinclair: When we first spoke about this solution, you mentioned Live Guide support and Connected Community. Would you please explain these concepts a bit more?

Noworatzky: Taken together, Live Guide™ support and the Connected Community offer unprecedented support to Panoptix customers.  Live Guide™ support provides access to Johnson Controls building efficiency experts, whose goal is to guide customers as they use the applications. The Connected Community is the first of its kind in the building efficiency industry -- an online resource for the solution users and non-users alike that connects them online with subject matter experts, industry thought leaders and others to share tips, answer questions and learn about the latest trends in building efficiency. Connected Community participants can directly access building efficiency related information, forums and blogs as well as social networking tools.

Sinclair: How does the Panoptix solution actually work?

Noworatzky: The offering is based on an open integration platform. The platform is open to a multitude of building systems via a series of “adapters” and open to the applications via a series of services. The platform collects large amounts of disparate data from the varied building systems and “normalizes” that data to provide a consistent presentation to the applications developed by Johnson Controls or third parties, including customer-developed applications.
 
The platform and the applications are hosted in the cloud. The cloud-based hosting provides several advantages. First, it enables capital versus expense trade-offs for customers. It also simplifies installation and allows for rapid deployment of new value-driven offerings. Finally, cloud-based hosting leverages computing power to perform high-level analytics. These patented analytics are available to any of the applications, eliminating duplication of functionality and providing optimized building intelligence.

The platform is a scalable, open, integrating application and IT-friendly framework. It allows for data access from anywhere and from any device for any customer.

Sinclair: Just to be clear, this solution is not another building management system. What makes it different from a BMS?

Noworatzky: A building management system (BMS) is a control system used to ensure comfortable indoor environments. The Panoptix solution is a powerful suite of applications and support that work hand-in-hand with nearly any BMS to provide the analytics and actionable information necessary to ensure a single facility or a portfolio of facilities is as efficient as possible. This solution combines BMS data with other important data, including utility consumption and weather data, to provide in-depth analysis. In fact, it can utilize data from building, business and specialty systems and is most powerful when provided with as much data as the user can provide via the existing BMS and other building systems.

Sinclair: How will this system integrate with an organization’s IT department?

Noworatzky: The solution is an IT-friendly technology, which is sold as Software as a Service (SaaS), and provides experts who can work with the customer’s IT department to leverage the latest technologies to fit within current IT policies.

Sinclair: How will it support the trend toward “big data” and the analytics being applied to that data?

Noworatzky: Bringing big data up from the building systems or equipment level is the next step toward knowing how to run facilities in the most efficient manner. As the volume, variety and velocity of data increases, this solution makes it easy to collect, manage and analyze that data, converting it into a common language and turning it into intuitive actionable insight. This data can be used to:

As a result, users have improved visibility into their systems and can begin to operate in a more proactive and efficient way.

contemporary Sinclair: How can customers be assured their data is secure?

Noworatzky: It’s important to note that Panoptix customers own their own data. Johnson Controls will only use it to provide customer support and expert advice on their current applications or the delivery of related services and offerings.

Four security elements are in place to protect customer data:

Sinclair: What applications will be offered with the initial phase of the Panoptix solution?

Noworatzky: The initial offering includes four applications, each backed by Live Guide™ support and the Connected Community:

The Panoptix suite of applications will continue to expand, with both Johnson Controls and partner-developed applications that address a number of subjects, including integrated controls, alarm management and customer defined workflows as well as more adapters to connect with more data types, and more analytics.



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