option.com

Active operation optimization

We were contacted by an installer of climate control equipment for commercial and industrial buildings. They needed a partner capable of supplying a flexible platform to build various monitoring and control solutions. Their vision was to become a single source supplier capable of offering solutions overseeing and remotely managing all aspects of a building's ongoing operations in order to minimize cost.

Phase one of their product development focused on heating and cooling. One desired use case was the ability to monitor and adjust climate control settings in the most energy-efficient manner possible. A second involved the active monitoring of HVAC systems to spot mechanical and other performance issues before they became catastrophic.

After a review of various M2M communications suppliers, the company chose to base the design of their products on CloudGate:

• Hardware: The CloudGate Gateway's modular product design allows maximum connectivity to various machine interfaces, via plug and play extension cards.
• Software: Our open software architecture allowed the vendor to quickly configure our hardware to their desired feature sets. In addition, CloudGate Universe allows simple and cost-effective software deployment in the field.
• Support: Our in-house application development team quickly developed a series of features to help them get to market faster – giving them a competitive edge in the process.

Today, the company's products are installed and conditions are remotely monitored via a proprietary web interface. Their customers are kept comfortable in the most efficient manner possible – while providing the building's owners a very solid ROI.

In addition, the company now has the ability to quickly develop additional offerings – such as the monitoring and optimization of lighting and water use – or develop custom applications on a client-by-client basis.