How NAU moved from siloed IoT data to real energy savings using ontologies and command-and-control

This NexusCon 2025 presentation brings together Rick Szcodronski and Christopher Manna from Willow, Steve Burrell from Northern Arizona University, and Jose de Castro from Mapped to show how a large public university turned years of disconnected building data into something operators could actually use. The group tackled a familiar problem for campuses: hundreds of buildings, multiple BMSs, room scheduling systems, sensors, and meters—but no reliable way to connect context across them.

Using NAU’s 175-building, 7-million-square-foot campus as the backdrop, they walked through how data aggregation, ontology mapping, and practical tooling enabled real operational use cases instead of dashboards for dashboards’ sake. The focus wasn’t theory—it was how frontline teams finally got from raw data to decisions.

Behind the paywall, you’ll see what surprised the team about how hard context—not data—was the real bottleneck, and why earlier in-house attempts failed despite strong IT and data science resources. The speakers break down what it actually took to map rooms to zones, zones to terminal units, and schedules to sensors at scale—and how co-pilot style workflows replaced weeks of manual engineering work.

You’ll also learn how NAU achieved meaningful energy savings by putting unoccupied rooms into standby, why buy-versus-build mattered, and how the same architecture now supports sustainability reporting, student research, and AI-driven operations. If you’re responsible for a campus or portfolio drowning in building data but starving for outcomes, this recording will feel uncomfortingly familiar—and very useful.

Watch the full recording inside Nexus Pro →