Last week, SHIFT announced a new strategic partnership with the leader in edge computing, IOTech. Let’s take a deeper look at what this partnership means for SHIFT’s products and customers.
IOTech’s Edge Central™ is a flexible, open edge data platform that makes industrial data easily accessible, actionable, and manageable. SHIFT Energy’s EOSair™ (and our upcoming products) will use Edge Central to securely acquire data from Building Automation Systems (BAS) or Building Management Systems (BMS). From there, it is sent to the cloud where it is analyzed by SHIFT using Machine Learning and predictive modelling, with the resulting optimizations provided directly to the building control system to boost operational efficiency.
SHIFT delivers its customers significant energy consumption and cost savings while also curbing Greenhouse Gas emissions – all without any impact on occupant comfort or process control conditions.
Here are a few of the major advantages from this new partnership:
Open Platform and Architecture – this ensures the efficient collection and distribution of building data to SHIFT’s EOS products using modern and non-proprietary protocols. Toolsets offered by IOTech make backend data integration and data distribution much more efficient.
Data Acquisition and Database Storage – Edge Central offers better administrative dashboards that allow for easier discovery of devices and networks. It is also much easier to troubleshoot using Edge Central, which allows problems to be identified and resolved before they become issues for tenants.
BYOD – with SHIFT and Edge Central, you can “bring your own device” – there is no need to use clumsy or expensive proprietary equipment. Edge Central is a software-only solution that can run on any Linux-based hardware. This gives SHIFT greater flexibility to choose the best hardware for our gateways.
Predefined Schema and Tagging – IOTech’s software defines event schema across portfolios of buildings, with tags easily assigned through a specific device profile. This feature allows SHIFT to organize points and associate every point with a specific building, zone, space, or device to use them in optimizations.
Flexible Rules Engine – the flow-based automation utility included in Edge Central enables SHIFT to implement EOS-specific read, discovery and control flows which will also allow us to implement local optimizations.
Better Support – open-source software offers a wealth of readily accessible knowledge. Edge Central is a well-supported version of EdgeX Foundry which offers a number of popular and widely adopted utilities.
Add it all up and our new strategic partnership means better energy optimization from your building’s existing controls and HVAC equipment. That in turn means more savings and an even faster payback for deploying the SHIFT solution.
Looks like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
