Buildy Award Winners Announced

By Consulting Specifying Engineer Staff June 22, 2006

A gathering of building integration and IT experts selected five Buildy Award winners at the Industry Gala at BuilConn 2006 last month in Palm Springs, Calif. This marks the third year for the Buildy Awards program, which honors North American organizations and individuals who best support the vision of networked building systems and was designed to increase awareness of the benefits of whole-building integration and honor successful implementation and product development strategies.

Here are the winners:

John J. “Jack” McGowan, President, Energy Control, Inc., was presented the Vision award for his vision of whole-building integration and interoperability through advocacy, promotion, education and training endeavors. McGowan’s company has merged traditional energy automation with e-commerce solutions that integrate multiple systems, including security and fire, via the Internet, allowing customers to make decisions with real-time dynamic information from a myriad of sources to optimize facility, business and energy management.

A new addition to the Buildy Awards in 2006, the Initiative award honors a company or organization that has shown or launched a key initiative to enable or otherwise forward the subject of integrated and intelligent buildings. The inaugural Initiative award was presented to Cisco Systems, Inc. for Cisco Connected Real Estate. CCRE is a framework that promotes the convergence of IT and building systems producing the next generation of intelligent environments where we work, live, play and learn. The CCRE framework supports real estate stakeholders in the transformation of how they design, build, operate and use the physical built environment.

Connected Real Estate suggests an IP infrastructure or building information network as the fourth utility in buildings. This new technology foundation allows for the connection and integration of communications, security and building automation technologies within one facility, as well as with those of other facilities around the world.

The Best New Product award was presented to Gridlogix, Inc. in honor of the EnNET Enterprise Server. EES enables businesses to efficiently manage the multi-system complexity found in most modern facilities. It translates existing automation protocols into languages that can be used to easily integrate device and sensor networks into software applications throughout the enterprise, and provides a unified, standards-based web-services framework that enables companies to leverage existing monitoring and control systems; build interoperability between disparate automation systems; streamline real time to business integration processes; and connect with supply-chain partners. Valuable data from a multitude of proprietary and open systems presented through a common interface enables customers to find new opportunities and fix the problems that matter.

The Best Integration Project award celebrates the successful integration of a wide array of building systems and their operation over a corporate IT infrastructure, and this year was presented to Cyrus Technologies, Inc. for the enterprise building management system integration project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (see Carolina Connectivity for more on this project). The EBMS is an initiative under way at UNC-CH to deploy a truly open architected enterprise system for managing many disparate building automation technologies. The goal is to dispense with the myriad of operational applications that are dedicated to proprietary building control systems that exist on campus today, yet allow the actual control systems to remain in place, and do this with an enterprise application that allows the university to choose from any open building automation standard in future.

Finally, the Best Building award was presented to The Boeing Company and accepted by LonMark International for Boeing’s commercial airplane facility in Long Beach, Calif., in honor of the most progressive building technology supporting the vision of whole-building integration. The project saves Boeing tens of thousands of dollars annually by incorporating more than a dozen different manufacturers’ products integrated into several buildings on the campus. A unique feature of the user interface is a real-time running tally of the energy consumption savings since Boeing installed the first LonWorks system upgrades several years ago. The facility includes lighting, HVAC, security, fire/life safety, energy management and occupancy in one fully integrated system using off-the-shelf LonMark-certified devices.