The Nexus Podcast

“I talk about market transformation forces. I think Volttron has that potential, not necessarily that everyone's going to adopt Volttron, but the fact that this open platform that exists that has some of these functionalities… It’s like a pressure source… to move the needle.” – Andrew Rodgers   My Highlights Defining the independent data layer (8:20) Deep dive into Volttron (16:06) Updates from th...

“I don't have a single one-liner, 25-words-or-less elevator pitch about what a smart building is. Every building is going to be different. What value are you trying to get out of it? And then I'll tell you what the smart building looks like. " — Shen Chiu     My Highlights How Jim thinks about building tech in three interrelated buckets (13:49) The landlord-tenant split incentive and how it makes...

“Future readiness… this isn't about guessing that 5G is the future on this particular frequency, and I'm going to put that in my building and put all my eggs in that basket. It's about: how do we take a step back and make sure that as and when these technologies mature to a level that they're a definite ‘must have’ in a building, that I, as a landlord, can rapidly evolve the way my building is set...

“I think where the industry needs to get to is… looking at how best to service a portfolio, rather than the kind of one-to-one [management team to building] relationship. And there's a tipping point of scale where it's not even like a business case anymore, it's like an IQ test as to whether you've got that different [portfolio-scale] operational model in place. But I think like what the technolog...

“So I know that's your favorite question and you want me to answer it, but I I'd reword it: Why is the adoption of technology behind? I won't go to say the technologies behind because this industry invented a lot of firsts.” — John Petze   My Highlights John’s career history (2:02) Why technology adoption is so far behind: split everything (21:02) The history of Tridium (24:21) SkyFoundry: how and...

“There's a mentality, at least in Silicon Valley that says, ‘Hey, we're just going to run in like a bull in a China shop and disrupt… Disrupt, disrupt, disrupt.’ If you're a startup and you do that in this sector, you're just going to be one of a number of other companies off on the side of the road in a ditch." – Scott Ellison   My Highlights Why is technology behind (it’s potential) (5:02) The 8...

“Buildings are not bonds… The key difference that I think a huge amount of the real estate industry does not appreciate is that a building is a product that people have to use. So it is a fixed income asset, but it is also a product that people need to be in, you know, for you to make money as an owner. And that is really, really evident right now.” – Aaron Lapsley     My Highlights Aaron walks us...

“I was very quickly disappointed once I realized there was a huge gap between the promise and the reality of BIM… The reality was that BIM was, is still largely used for drawing production, right? It's used for coordination, clash detection, and drawing production. " – Anand Mecheri   My Highlights Anand’s past companies, all sold to Siemens (1:41) James’ favorite question (4:08) The problem and o...

“The more time we spend going to answer a hot/cold call, the less time we spend taking care of key issues and making sure the facilities really runs right. And you can't send a person around fast enough to check all the things that your technology solution can check. It's just not even practical to think of all the different things… So there is a huge payback for every single person that tries to...

“We've solved so many things where the engineering staff has been like, ‘I bet you this was going on for 10 years.’ It's been happening forever… whether that's a damper, whether the fans are running 24/7, whatever's broken. It's just really good at identifying things that would not otherwise be identified.” — Adam Kaufman   My Highlights Why this university decided to pursue analytics (5:30) A his...

“Because that large scale technology transformation hasn’t happened, that’s probably the cause of outdated business models, lack of IT skillsets, lack of ownership of technology initiatives and leaving it to vendors, etc. It was once the same for other industries. I think the building owners themselves will be the champions of this change.” – Rajavel Subramanian   My Highlights why buildings are s...

“Every building owner is on their own path and it’s our job as an industry to meet them where they are on that path, not to yell at them from the end of the path, telling them that they're losers, if they're not over here.” — Shannon Smith My Highlights How Shannon got sucked into BMS (2:59) A ‘violent’ agreement with past answers to James’ favorite question + a unique take from Shannon’s finance...

“I think that leveraging both is incredibly important. You need the software to be modular enough to merge everything together. But you need a willingness for partnerships to then leverage the benefits that come out of that.” — Josh Adams   My Highlights A new answer to the new favorite question: partnerships (9:05) What innovation looks like within the Big Four (13:49) An alternative to disruptio...

“This is like the moral compass to our industry, right? We're totally fixated on customer benefits and savings; and in order to pivot so we are also considering grid benefits and GHGs, we need to make them valuable, and this is how we do it…” — Matt Golden   My Highlights Diving into the ‘old world’ of utility incentives (8:51) Introducing the new model of mutual benefits (11:31) The struggle for...

"We can’t try to bring them all [ontologies] together. We can’t make them all one. What we need to do is really focus on delivering the outcomes and delivering the use cases, and then have data engineers worry about how to normalize that data. Because at the end of the day, the ontology doesn't deliver any outcome. It only enables, right? It's not an outcome.” – Brian Turner   My Highlights New ye...

"It's not a technology question. It's not a performance problem. It's a people problem. If a new building is being built… and the owner says, “I want my OT system, security cameras, lighting, elevators… etc. to be on my IT network,” the simple question to ask is: is IT now going to be responsile for the construction phase and all the responsibilities of OT? " — Ping Yao   My Highlights Ping explai...

"If there’s one thing that makes the success of a smart building, it is the combination of real estate, facilities, IT, hospitality, all those people in one organization that basically report to [the same person]… [And] if these people understand that they’re not building this building for themselves, but for the future employees of their company, then that makes a lot of difference.” — Erik Ubels...

“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 r...

“I think it’s a huge issue that people face when they’re dealing with digital twins: it’s very easy to get lost in the art of the possible, or even just the academia of a digital twin… And the possibilities are, I guess we could call it endless. That might be cliche, but the key to actually unlocking that value is getting started somewhere.” – Matthew Vogel   You can find Matthew Vogel on LinkedIn...

“Google operates at such a scale that we're often the largest customer of any given system in any domain, whether it's a physical security system or an HVAC head-end, you know, et cetera, et cetera, … to the point where we start breaking these things. Scale really is, with traditional approaches, oftentimes a barrier.  And the whole goal of what we’re trying to do in the smart buildings world is t...

“Not being able to use that word in a sales pitch is a mistake, because when you can use that word and throw it in, you’re able to tell the receiving audience: I know your business. ” — Joe Gaspardone   You can find Joe Gaspardone on LinkedIn . Watch on YouTube or read on the web. Get full access to Nexus.

“Fitness equipment… leak detection… water treatment, irrigation… everything needs an IP address now. So you’re either stuck reinventing the wheel each time, or you’ve got to connect it to some centralized, monitored place. And that’s the message: don’t forget, BMS people, there’s this burgeoning, giant, parallel connectivity issue that’s happening right at the same time.” — Joe Gaspardone   You ca...

“You see all these devices, you see all these components, and all of this data. You're like, can I do more by bringing all this together to create a unified experience? Not only for the facilities manager. But also for the owner developer and the final end user of the space and building. So for me, it was shock, admiration, and the opportunity to transform this industry.” – Emmanuel Daniel You can...

“I think that’s what we’re all missing is we’re all spending so much time on integration and doing the same sh*t differently, that we’re not able to get to those new use cases that then move the industry forward” —James Dice   You can find Mike Brooman on LinkedIn . Watch on YouTube or read on the web. Get full access to Nexus.

“When you come in and try to take control… or transparency and ownership of the system away from somebody, that’s when you start running into problems. I think you have to not just replace a process, but data-enrich the process… It has to be able to engage with people onsite.” —Tyson Soutter You can find our panelists on LinkedIn: Keith Gipson , Tyson Soutter , Terry Herr , and Jean-Simon Venne ....