By Tricia Cleppe
rAVe Staffer

Prominent industry leaders gathered for the Smart Building Conference at ISE 2014 to discuss current trends and the future of the smart building industry. The importance of proactivity was an underlying theme in the keynote address by Jim Sinopoli and the panel discussion with Kathy Farrington, Lee Funnell and Marc Haesen, led by Quentin Drewell.

According to these thought leaders, for the smart building industry to be successful, it needs data from end users. But these technologies are not cheap. Someone must have a compelling reason to buy, install and maintain these systems. A significant value proposition to the end user is the only way that smarter buildings and technology will be adopted by anyone other than early adopters. The ability to be proactive, and the potential monetary savings by doing so, is the one of the best selling points for these kinds of technologies. Speakers included real world examples, such as Microsoft’s campus in Redmond, to showcase the money that can be saved by installing smart systems that will alert an owner before a potential issue becomes a very real problem.

This type of proactivity and the savings that result from knowing to fix a problem before it happens, is exactly what smart building technology needs to be of value to consumers. If end users could rely on smart building systems to inform them of potential flaws that waste money, like an Automatic Fault Detection and Diagnostics system does, there would be an incentive for all to install these technologies based on monetary gain and convenience.

The speakers at today’s Smart Building Conference at ISE 2014 believe this added value will encourage more people to invest in smarter buildings and technologies in the next ten years. In the words of keynote speaker Jim Sinopoli, “If an airplane can operate eight miles above the earth on ‘autopilot’ why can’t a building on the ground do so?”