Page 63 - Climate Control News - July 2018

Building Automation
Preview of Microsoft’s new services technology
MICROSOFT IS PLANNING to introduce new platform services that will let companies setting up or operating smart buildings figure out where that perfectly adjusted desk chair that someone “borrowed” wound up.
The new “spatial intelligence” platform-as-a- service technology was launched in private pre- view mode last month. As the technology ma- tures, Microsoft Azure users will be able
during a presentation which featured a futuristic office that understood when certain people en- tered a conference room and automatically add- ed them to an ongoing meeting.
The yet-to-be-named Azure IoT spatial intel- ligence services build on similar ideas and are designed for commercial real-estate brokers and building owners that want to offer their tenants
smart-building services.
They will allow those operators to
help their own customers track movable objects “down to understanding where a specific desk or chair is located” with sensors as well as set role-based access controls needed for security, Van Hoof told GeekWire in an interview.
“As the industrial Internet of Things (IoT) becomes more and more preva-
lent, it’s not enough to just pack sensors and computing power into everything; you’ll need something to manage the associations be- tween those objects, their owners, and their locations in order to extract relevant data,” Van Hoof said.
“A specific focus with this is, how do you model the relationships between people, plac- es, and devices?” “Once you’ve established those relationships, it’s much easier to use software to look for better or more efficient ways to set up a building.”
Microsoft is working with several part- ners during the private preview phase of the new services, including Steelcase, which specializes in furniture and workplace de- sign, and commercial real estate company CBRE Group. ✺
All chairs are accounted for in this building where owners can offer tenants smart building services.
to use it within the workplace to under- stand how people and devices move in and out of various spaces around the of- fice, which could make capacity and re- source planning easier, according to Bert Van Hoof, partner and group prod- uct manager for Azure IoT.
Bert Van Hoof, group product manager for
Microsoft provided a glimpse of some
of these spatial-orientation concepts Azure IoT
CLIMATE CONTROL NEWS JULY 2018
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