(Building operations and management your passion? Watch for Better Buildings, a new supplement to Real Estate Forum, launching in our February/March issue.)
NEW YORK CITY-To those in the design, construction and building operations industry, the concept of cloud computing can have many different meanings, from servers to code to different devices – even the kitchen sink. But panelists at the 2012 Buildings NY conference agreed that the new technology could have a major impact on property performance and employee productivity as the workplace continues to evolve in the digital direction.
“It also facilitates greater levels of collaboration between users, which could be beneficial to multidisciplinary teams, which are very common in our industry, and particularly common when looking to build high-performance buildings as well,” said panelist Matt Ostanik, president of Submittal Exchange, a provider of integrated project collaboration software for design, construction communications and LEED project management.
By definition, cloud computing is defined by a “broad array of web-based services aimed at allowing users to obtain a wide-range of functional capabilities on a pay as you go basis that previously required tremendous hardware investments and professional skills to acquire,” Ostanik said. He explained that many in the business are beginning to utilize software as a service, or SaaS, a subset of cloud computing that individual companies can release software and access it through the Internet, and reduces the need to install local IT hardware.
In terms of commercial real estate, the evolution of wireless networks can now equal—and surpass, in some cases—traditional wired networks in their ability to manage and control inherently disbursed and traditionally uncontrolled energy use such as plug loads, which can represent up to 25% of a building’s energy use.
The advances in technology can also help owners and managers navigate the LEED process more quickly and efficiently by determining appropriate strategies to reach green building performance goals and aligning project team strategies online – from any location.
“The speed in which the installation and the monitoring can begin is tremendous, as opposed to contracting and wiring,” said Brian Simons, regional sales manager at Firetide, Inc., a provider of wireless mesh infrastructure technology. “The man hour savings alone creates a tremendous return on investment.”
Richard Ellenbogen, president of Power Factor Correction LLC, a New York-based electrical engineering firm, has also reaped the benefits of the technology.
“In terms of the wireless technology, we used it to implement our whole projects, and we did, in terms of data collections from a utility point of view and in terms of managing loads,” he said, “It is invaluable. I don’t know if we could have done our project without wireless technology, which was not exactly the cloud, but it was along those lines. We would have had to go out every night and start monitoring these things and pulling down data.”
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