The Nexus Podcast

“APIs are like toothbrushes: everybody's got one but nobody wants to use anyone else's." —Michael Grant   My Highlights Michael's background and COO role at multiple companies (1:07) What is Metrikus? (9:24) How Metrikus plays as an overlay and independent data layer (14:03) Making the business case and whether technology providers should capture the full value their solution provides (19:14) How...

“We were lucky enough that early on we built a team that included facilities management, physical security, sustainability, and IT. And we said, 'What are our common goals? Where can we reinforce each other? What are all stakeholders' needs and how can we solve them together?'" —Bayron Lopez Pineda My Highlights The origin story of the Kilroy smart buildings program, how IB helped set it up and ho...

“Diversity, equity, and inclusion isn't something that can be an add on. It's not a new part of your business. It should be integrating into your business. How do your core values align with your DEI efforts, your business practices, etc? Everything is literally connected." —Tara Turk Haynes    My Highlights The status quo of DEI and the smart buildings industry today (3:11) The value of diversity...

“You need no more evidence than the fact that McKinsey estimates that its largest practice within three years will be sustainability to know that the ESG transformation is the new digital transformation." -Will Cowell de Gruchy   My Highlights What is Infogrid (11:30) The founding story (12:07) What Infogrid does today and how much traction they have (18:07) To what Will attributes Infogrid's incr...

“The system was originally built to adjust supply, to meet demand. Everything about it was built that way, the market design, the physical infrastructure, everything. Now we're evolving it to also adjust demand to meet supply. Supply is becoming more and more intermittent, demand is becoming more and more flexible. The whole thing is just getting up-ended and for building owners, they can't just c...

“There's this line in Hamilton, 'Let's have a drink, the four of us. Tomorrow there'll be more of us.' And when I started out in green buildings, it definitely felt like there were just four of us. Today there are many more of us on this journey." —Ben Myers My Highlights What sustainability means to each stakeholder and how to message it to them (6:54) Ben's working theory about what it takes to...

"When the iPhone came in, the web was already there. With building systems, it's the other way around. You had a lot of technology in buildings, then we bolted the web on afterwards. That's a different direction, so it's trying to correct that and bring more web concepts in." —Trevor Pering My Highlights Trevor's focus at Google and differentiating the 3 types of IoT (5:56) Deep dive on DAQ - devi...

"I am hopeful. I feel like we're coming together around this issue in a way that I've never experienced in the past. This is something that's within our power to do something about." —Cara Carmichael   My Highlights The three reasons we need to decarbonize buildings (7:09) How the net-zero definition has changed over time (9:39) Part one of the roadmap: benchmarking and disclosure (12:38) Part two...

“There's never really been an API for buildings. And this is an impediment to every single corporation, every startup, every investor, the whole industry." —Troy Harvey   My Highlights An update on PassiveLogic (1:43) Where we need to go and how Quantum helps get us there (9:29) What is the Quantum Digital Twin Standard? (13:43) Why Quantum was needed when we have Haystack, Brick, etc (19:00) What...

“The grid is starting to look a lot like the internet. These IOT devices are distributed, digital, user owned and operated nodes. They can buy from the grid, they can sell from the grid, they can respond dynamically. These nodes are increasing ten, a hundred, a thousand fold over the next decade, which has really interesting implications for how we'll operate the grid going forward." —James McGinn...

“The issue with energy efficiency is that while it may be civilization's largest collective problem, for any individual business it's like their 12th biggest problem." —Ryan Morris   My Highlights How Turntide was founded as Software Motor Company (7:25) How the Turntide motor tech differs from what's in buildings today (11:09) Ryan's concept of engineering clu-de-sacs (16:55) The story of Riptide...

“I see of lot of people buying apps before they bought the smart phone. So our smart building strategy is to first build the smartphone foundation." —Jon Clarke   My Highlights Jon's experience as a contractor, consultant, and customer; how they're different and can work together (12:45) How and why the industry will shift from technology getting pushed on owners to owners doing the pushing. (21:3...

“You built a building 25 years ago, and the stuff you put in there, it’s still there.” -Keith Berkoben of Google"For consumer facing technology, you know, people talk about the market working in all kinds of mysterious ways, but if you don't have a feedback path, the market doesn't work.” - Andrew Rodgers of ACE IoT “So you have this fundamental difference of perspective, where the people who ran...

“You have the people that are using the buildings and those are the people that we all spend time thinking about, but a lot of time it's just trying to guess at what they want. And I just think that there's this real opportunity, with the technology that we have available today, to hear directly from them on what they want." —Jacinda Lofland Highlights How real estate is changing: it's no longer j...

“If you get utility rate payers to act together like a symphony and reduce their energy a little bit at these key times, that net effect is actually remarkable." -Cisco DeVries   Highlights Cisco's response to John Oliver's segment on PACE (6:25) What is OhmConnect? (12:38) The two primary problems OhmConnect had to solve: engage consumers on one side and sell their aggregated demand on the other....

“So you start seeing this cross pollination, worlds colliding, the traditional digital workplace applications with the traditional smart building solutions. We started working with our clients on helping them connect the dots on both sides of the house and the value. Not just from an operations standpoint, but from a space management standpoint,and most importantly, from an employee experience sta...

“We take that value creation reframe and we look at it through two ROI lenses. The traditional finance lens, which is return on investment, to understand the financial benefits. And then the second is a relevance assessment lens, which is the risk of ignoring your risk of being left behind. And so when we apply these two ROI perspectives, you find opportunities to create the value, to innovate." —...

"You feel like you're tackling an impossible problem because you're looking at such a broad set of solutions or in our case, now we're looking at such a broad set of manufacturers, and so many devices in our building, and every building is different. How can you ever address that? We'll just address everything and then move forward with whomever is willing to move forward with you. It could be at...

"So you live or die by the data at the end of the day, not the sticker on the front door." —Ruairi Barnwell My Highlights We need Building Intelligence Groups in every city (7:13) How we can overcome the challenges with the traditional design process (21:00) How owners are seeing the need for the IDL and how Nexus is spurring collaboration and community (26:08) Summarizing the past year of IAQ and...

"So that's how we got here... we were focused on enabling this massive energy retrofit opportunity or enabling people to implement this zero costs down energy savings. But then I realized there's no point if buildings don't have the infrastructure in place for that.” —Ben Birnbaum My Highlights Why Ben is a superconnector (14:27) Ben's 3 "Holy Grails" or massive opportunities: Project/Asset Financ...

“The point of Nirvana  is to have a self-tuning, self-commissioning building that is completely adapting itself (based on) the outside conditions and internal conditions of a building. That is clearly an endgame here that we're all after, but that is only one aspect of what you're talking about in terms of the investment you make.” —Jim Whalen My Highlights How Jim thinks about building tech in th...

“The sun is setting on building management systems as we know it and change is coming through building operating systems and packaged equipment control, which when delivered will eliminate the need for field fitted BMS control altogether.” —Rob Huntington My Highlights How Jim thinks about building tech in three interrelated buckets (13:49) The landlord-tenant split incentive and how it makes tech...

The digital readiness score is our way of quickly highlighting whether the building is ready (for new technology). We’re looking at network communication speed, the data density from the number of devices and points, the data accessibility based on the protocols, and the scope of the digital systems. And that's been allowing us to say, “yes, you’re digital ready”. —Rachel Kennedy My Highlights Wha...

“The fact that other industries were being solved with an API, it really made sense to create this single layer that takes on all the historic complexity and abstracts it away into that API, so that everyone doesn't have to keep repeating the exact same task over and over again.” — Shaun Cooley   My Highlights How Jim thinks about building tech in three interrelated buckets (13:49) The landlord-te...

“I used to chase kilowatt-hours and now I'm chasing renewable energy.” — Rob Brimblecombe   My Highlights How Rob spearheaded the university's 100% renewables goal (12:56) How Monash defines Net Zero and how they're getting off gas (19:03) No longer chasing kilowatt-hours (32:00) How South Australia Water makes money off of demand flexibility (33:57) Good control means good grid economics (36:34)...