There’s a lot of discussion about commercial facilities’ “digital transformation.”
But what exactly is digital transformation? Why is it critical for today’s commercial facilities? And what technology enables this transformation?
According to Gartner, 91% of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative, and for 87% of senior business leaders, digitalization is a priority. Interestingly, 89% of all companies have already adopted a digital-first business strategy or plan to in the near future.
Digital transformation is not a low-cost endeavor, however. The global digital transformation market is expected to grow to $1,009.8 billion by 2025 (from $469.8 billion in 2020). Businesses are investing their hard-earned profits into digital transformation to meet the needs of a connected, digitized world of end-users. Whether it’s online banking, emails, texting, finding a place to eat, to travel to, and products to purchase–24x7x365 connected consumers demand businesses to meet their always-on needs. Businesses of all types and sizes are streamlining business operations to serve better and expedite customer relations and services. But this is only one way of many a transformation is occurring.
Edging Toward End-Users
One of the major technologies used by commercial digitized facilities is the rapidly scaling Edge infrastructure or computing near the application. This is the engine that powers digitized commercial facilities. Edge infrastructure brings a network of distributed computing capabilities closer to the users–powered by both very local small computing power as well as Edge data centers. These smaller data centers (with 8-10 racks) with a power profile of 100KW at most, serve localized regions and can perfectly fit into a few city blocks. Edge computing power allows IoT devices to stay small and affordable while allowing near-location computing power to use this data quickly in many applications that require speed and precision instead of having to transfer data to a hyper-scale or other data center, which could be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
With Edge infrastructure built closer to end-users, businesses gain expedited data processing capabilities with low latency, which is critical for digitized businesses responsible for providing uninterrupted, 24x7x365 services. Commercial facilities can exploit this edge computing capability to transform on-the-fly data from building automation systems–from lighting, security cameras, emergency systems, elevators, access entry and exit doors, digital signs, heat/light sensors, monitoring occupancy, and energy usage, among others, into split-second decisions.
Working in tandem with a larger infrastructure, often in Colo or hyper-scale data centers, Edge data centers have a low tolerance for failure or outages since they serve critical, essential infrastructure for public or private enterprise applications. They also are built around the concept of redundancy, given they can be strategically placed affordably in high-need markets. Edge data centers themselves are often an assortment of multi-vendor software solutions typically networked together and with no on-site staff. They are remotely managed and monitored using an IoT Platform, which unifies the distributed systems, technologies, software, and hardware into a single source of truth allowing for cohesive remote monitoring and management. An added advantage to these IoT Platforms is simplicity in deployment enabling remote rollout and management of Edge infrastructure–whether it’s one or thousands of sites spread across a city, a country, or around the globe.
Real-Time Data Means Real-Time Actionable Business Decisions
The real key to edge computing is dealing with sizeable amounts of data which IoT devices and inbuilding systems are fairly good at providing. However, that data is typically raw, isolated, siloed data and is worthless on its own. Data is only valuable when aggregated and analyzed in real-time with a historical context in operations. With expedited data access, via an IoT Platform, data transforms into actionable outcomes to help drive the best business decisions and adapt to business changes over time.
Facilities managers and operators armed with real-time access to actionable analytics can take a range of actions previously not perceivable. From optimizing energy usage across various facilities to improving customer/occupant comfort to pre-emptive maintenance of equipment to revert costly expenditures and business operations disruptions–these are all among the top cost-effective benefits for commercial facilities’ OpEx.
Since IoT Platforms are typically open-source and vendor-agnostic solutions they allow varied devices from different vendors to work seamlessly together without a vendor lock. While IoT Platforms don’t replace a BMS, or other purpose-built solutions for individual trades–instead they synergistically consolidate all the systems across building portfolios.
IoT Platforms also help to disaster-proof critical assets before major problems turn into irreversible disasters or lead to downtime which can be catastrophic within itself. With our digitized world of always-on demands, downtime is never an option for any business or commercial facility. IoT platforms enable any style of facility to allow for notifications of impending risks and allow operators to easily modify to adapt to changing environments or equipment–all conducted remotely. This ability to adapt and divert risks in a timely manner, while also allowing remote triage, drastically lowers operational costs–but more importantly, ensures uninterrupted uptime.
Across various commercial facilities, managers leveraging Edge infrastructure can expedite service delivery, and provide reliable performance across high-traffic sites like hospitals, shopping malls, airports, and more. With the digital transformation of commercial facilities becoming the norm, Edge data centers working in synergy with IoT Platforms are the most cost-effective solutions to expedite rapid provisioning of newly deployed facilities globally while providing the unifying layer over existing infrastructure. All this is done without requiring rewiring, replacement, or ripping out existing systems.
IoT Platforms are an abstraction of data connectivity easily added to any digitized commercial facility, which provides facility operators full access to actionable data and cost-effective monitoring to enable remote operation 7×24.
About the Author
Michael Skurla is the Chief Product Officer of Radix IoT which empowers diverse facilities and infrastructure with a cloud-native platform that organizes and unlocks critical data, providing actionable insights to enhance operational efficiency and cost reduction. He has over 25 years of experience in control automation and IoT product design with Fortune 500 companies. He is a contributing member of ASHRAE, IES Education, and USGBC and a frequent lecturer on the evolving use of analytics and emerging IT technologies to foster efficiency within commercial facility design.
