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Hey friends,
Have you listened to our latest podcast? It’s the first episode in a new series we’re creating called Buyer Roundups. Within Buyer Roundups, we “round up” buyers of smart building technology from a specific building-vertical type and ask them to share their experiences.
Why are we doing this? We think it provides yet another avenue to accelerate the smart building industry. These buyers get to commiserate with each other on their challenges, celebrate their individual success stories, and brainstorm the future of their buildings together, all while vendors can listen in and develop new technologies that are actually hitting the mark.
We started the Buyer Roundups with the Higher Education vertical: the people who operate the buildings within our colleges and universities.
In this first podcast, we sat down with Gerry Hamilton of Stanford University, Durga Sarilla of Kansas State University, and Dan Quigley of Boston University. We asked them about:
As a preview, here are some common themes we saw across these universities...
Universities are extremely public-facing institutions. Their carbon footprint and energy consumption remain the primary drivers of their smart building programs. Moreover, it’s typical for universities to have their own central utility plants for chilled water and hot water production, at the very least. Many act as virtual (or actual) utility providers, further complicating and highlighting energy consumption and production efficiency.
Beyond the apparent energy consumption and carbon reduction goals, universities are defined by the communities they create. While hybrid work has pivoted the focus of many commercial building types, the experience within higher education is still grounded in the physical, face-to-face interactions that define the community.
Higher education is typically synonymous with millions of square feet and hundreds of buildings. When one building is renovated or rebuilt, another is immediately outdated. This creates a never-ending carousel of expired infrastructure. To ride on the carousel, higher education buyers have to transcend generations of tech: in one building, they may be using cutting-edge cloud-based automatic functional testing with an FDD tool to help triage maintenance work orders, while in the next, they are replacing the compressor on a circa-1980 pneumatic controller the size of a door. It’s the smart building equivalent to Michael J. Fox hopping in and out of the DeLorean.
As each higher-ed building operator takes baby steps toward a comprehensive data layer, they create an entirely new data management challenge. Accessing data isn’t necessarily the challenge—consuming it is. How do they develop procedures for getting data to the people who need it (especially those outside of building operations!) in a self-serving, interpretable, and reliable fashion?
As Gerry Hamilton from Stanford puts it, his job is to increase the number of people around the table when Stanford talks about a smart campus. This means developing use cases for people who may not have ever thought about smart building technology. Can the custodial staff learn cleaning patterns from IAQ sensors? Can the public safety group get easy access to occupancy counting data? Does the classroom scheduling team use the same room-naming nomenclature as the HVAC VAV boxes?
Getting more people around the “smart campus table” not only improves the efficiency of countless other departments, but it can provide valuable merit to your smart buildings program and help you win the budget for the next big project.
Buyer Roundups allow brilliant people with the same problems to learn, empathize, and converse with others living through the same ever-complex and ever-changing Northstar of developing the best smart buildings of the future. We encourage you to give it a listen, and see what takeaways you can excavate to help us all accelerate this industry.
Question for you: who should we interview next?
—James and the Nexus Labs team
P.S. Bonus: The Nexus Pro community also got a deep dive on Duke University’s smart buildings program last week. Members can check out the recording here!
Hey friends,
Have you listened to our latest podcast? It’s the first episode in a new series we’re creating called Buyer Roundups. Within Buyer Roundups, we “round up” buyers of smart building technology from a specific building-vertical type and ask them to share their experiences.
Why are we doing this? We think it provides yet another avenue to accelerate the smart building industry. These buyers get to commiserate with each other on their challenges, celebrate their individual success stories, and brainstorm the future of their buildings together, all while vendors can listen in and develop new technologies that are actually hitting the mark.
We started the Buyer Roundups with the Higher Education vertical: the people who operate the buildings within our colleges and universities.
In this first podcast, we sat down with Gerry Hamilton of Stanford University, Durga Sarilla of Kansas State University, and Dan Quigley of Boston University. We asked them about:
As a preview, here are some common themes we saw across these universities...
Universities are extremely public-facing institutions. Their carbon footprint and energy consumption remain the primary drivers of their smart building programs. Moreover, it’s typical for universities to have their own central utility plants for chilled water and hot water production, at the very least. Many act as virtual (or actual) utility providers, further complicating and highlighting energy consumption and production efficiency.
Beyond the apparent energy consumption and carbon reduction goals, universities are defined by the communities they create. While hybrid work has pivoted the focus of many commercial building types, the experience within higher education is still grounded in the physical, face-to-face interactions that define the community.
Higher education is typically synonymous with millions of square feet and hundreds of buildings. When one building is renovated or rebuilt, another is immediately outdated. This creates a never-ending carousel of expired infrastructure. To ride on the carousel, higher education buyers have to transcend generations of tech: in one building, they may be using cutting-edge cloud-based automatic functional testing with an FDD tool to help triage maintenance work orders, while in the next, they are replacing the compressor on a circa-1980 pneumatic controller the size of a door. It’s the smart building equivalent to Michael J. Fox hopping in and out of the DeLorean.
As each higher-ed building operator takes baby steps toward a comprehensive data layer, they create an entirely new data management challenge. Accessing data isn’t necessarily the challenge—consuming it is. How do they develop procedures for getting data to the people who need it (especially those outside of building operations!) in a self-serving, interpretable, and reliable fashion?
As Gerry Hamilton from Stanford puts it, his job is to increase the number of people around the table when Stanford talks about a smart campus. This means developing use cases for people who may not have ever thought about smart building technology. Can the custodial staff learn cleaning patterns from IAQ sensors? Can the public safety group get easy access to occupancy counting data? Does the classroom scheduling team use the same room-naming nomenclature as the HVAC VAV boxes?
Getting more people around the “smart campus table” not only improves the efficiency of countless other departments, but it can provide valuable merit to your smart buildings program and help you win the budget for the next big project.
Buyer Roundups allow brilliant people with the same problems to learn, empathize, and converse with others living through the same ever-complex and ever-changing Northstar of developing the best smart buildings of the future. We encourage you to give it a listen, and see what takeaways you can excavate to help us all accelerate this industry.
Question for you: who should we interview next?
—James and the Nexus Labs team
P.S. Bonus: The Nexus Pro community also got a deep dive on Duke University’s smart buildings program last week. Members can check out the recording here!
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