IoT Powered Digital Infrastructures: An Incremental Journey - Amarjeet Singh

PropTech Podcast

This talk is by Dr Amarjeet Singh, CTO and Co-Founder Zenatix Solutions Private Limited. Zenatix is part of a multi-billion dollar Hero Group in India and is focused on providing connected solutions for enterprises in India and abroad. Amarjeet begins this talk explaining briefly about the ZenConnect solution of Zenatix. ZenConnect is a mini-BMS for a small format retail store that allows a chain of such stores to have central visibility, reduce energy consumption, improve compliance and better maintain their assets using predictive analytics. Thereon he provides key insights into challenges faced by large buildings (that have Building Management Systems - BMS) or smaller infrastructures for which BMS is unaffordable. He explains how both the formats of infrastructure provide new opportunities for digitization since the archaic BMS either fails to deliver the full promise using the rich data that already gets collected or it is just unaffordable thus leaving smaller infrastructures (especially those with less than 50k sq feet) continue with manual and inefficient controls. He then discusses 3 key IoT technologies that are powering the new age digital infrastructures - namely battery-powered wireless mesh sensors (that allow for plug and play deployment), open and extensible edge gateway (allowing for intelligent edge computations) and a smart wireless control node. He argues that these 3 technologies put together can allow for affordable IoT connectivity across a wide variety of HVAC components available across different formats of built infrastructure and across the world. Finally, he provides an interesting methodology whereby a building occupant/operator can incrementally decide to digitise their infrastructure gaining significant advantages at each step. This is unlike current BMS which require huge upfront investment and whereby doing them in piecemeal fashion further makes their adoption and maintenance challenges. At a first step, basic energy monitoring together with ambient sensing can provide rich data to perform automated fault detection and diagnosis using an integrated ticketing system. At the second level, one can instrument control on the airside, for smaller HVAC units and for lighting. At the third step of this journey, one can integrate other systems such as CAFM, Occupancy sensors and surveillance systems to perform more intelligent operations than are otherwise possible without this additional information. Finally, one can look into more complex water side control such as cooling tower and chillers. Zenatix can enable building operators/occupants incrementally live through this journey. Zenatix is also looking for partnerships with System Integrators across the world with whom it can partner to expand across different geographies with this solution.