Almost every corporate building, mall, residential complex, hos­pital, school, college or SEZ built today can be intelligent and managed intelligently. This is possible through Building Manage­ment Systems (BMS), which has tightly integrated mechanical as well as electrical systems that do everything from controlling the buildings, environment, lighting, security, maintaining servers, high speed networks and power operations. The BMS incorporated in a building saves energy while increasing reliability, security and efficiency. They can detect and repair a malfunc­tioning part of the building or its services and avoid serious consequences including a fire.

BMS can monitor, control and optimize services such as lights, security, heating, alarm, access control, ventilation, air-conditioning, computer systems, secure the networks and manage data centers.

The Integrated Building Management System (IBMS) is a single unit, which embraces within its fold all the core systems and installations of a building to form a centralized control system. The central architecture is configured as a local area network with the central workstation and control units for HVAC, lighting, security and life safety as the nodes. Communication between them is established by the use of common protocols like TCP/IP. Studies have shown that putting an IBMS in a facility has an impact of reducing operating costs by nearly 10 to 20 percent over what could have been- without compromising on quality.

Ingredients of BMS
BMS is a combination of different solu­tions controlled centrally by a single system. Some of the most common solutions incorporated in BMS include, energy and asset management solution, surveillance, perimeter surveil­lance, intrusion detection, access control, public addressal system, alarm control, fire safety (detection, prevention), under vehicle surveillance and baggage screening to name a few.

Tarun Ramrakhiani, Regional Marketing Leader-India and Middle East, Honeywell Building Solutions feels that the buildings built today are incorporating technology within it. “Today's office buildings are no longer the plain vanilla office spaces of a few years ago. The latest trend these days is to have 'intelligent buildings' which have IBMS. This system basically comprises systems for comfort-air condi­tioning and quality control; systems for safety-fire alarm systems; fire suppression systems, public address systems; systems for security-access control system, video survei­llance system, asset tracking system,” said Ramrakhiani.

“IBMS is essentially connec­ting various services in a building like HVAC, plumbing, fire fighting, lighting, lifts and elevators and the safety and security elements like fire alarm systems, access control and CCTV solutions on a common platform for opti­mized opera­tions. Its importance in buildings is growing by the day as the biggest expenses in commercial buildings are the power bill followed by man­power costs. Both of these are optimized by IBMS systems,” said Sameer Nagpal, CEO, Zicom Electronic Security Systems.

Vendors in BMS
There are many vendors involved in this space. For an instance, the video surveillance solutions are provided by vendors like Zicom, Voltas, Bosch, Honeywell, HCL Security Systems. In the BMS front there are companies like Honeywell, Sauter AG. There are also companies like Emerson, Kaba, Legic, Nordmann Engineering who provide diffe­rent solutions in different areas such as power, temperature control, engi­nee­ring to name a few verticals.

Honeywell is among the market leaders in the BMS space, which has an entire gamut of solutions.

Cisco provides a solution called Connected Real Estate, which is basically a framework that positions the “Network as the Platform”, and is aimed at facilitating the transformation of the real estate industry. Connected Real Estate benefits the key stakeholders of a property, namely owners, operators and users.

“The network becomes an intelligent building infrastructure and this intelligent building infrastructure creates an unpre­cedented opportunity for impro­ved services, enhanced processes, and cost-effective operations for everyone who uses or creates buildings, worldwide. It also addresses the needs of a business by creating a robust and agile network that offers high-speed building-wide Internet access, thereby enhancing mobility,” said R Dhamodaran, Sr VP-Channel Operations and Commercial Strategy, Cisco, India and SAARC

Cisco works with a set of partners to provide its Connected Real Estate Program called the Industry Solutions Partner Network (ISPN), which includes their solution-specific partners. These engage­ments are typically long-term and help Cisco to build a strong relationship based on imple­men­ting of solutions rather than products alone. There are also attractive financial rewards for ISPN partners under their Solution Incentive Program (SIP). Some of the partners with whom Cisco works include Percipia Networks, MagiNet, Intermec, Nomadix, IPCelerate, and Psion Teklogix.

There are persistent inno­vations happening in the BMS space, where vendors like Honeywell have innovated in creating smart centralized applications that bring these systems together and interlink them for better energy consum­ption and facilities management. Adding to that the systems can be integrated into enterprise systems (ERP) for better business intelligence. For example HR applications such as time and attendance monitoring, payroll processing etc can be based on access control systems.

Market for BMS
The demand for IBMS and Building Automation Systems (BAS) has emerged due to the increasing need to reduce operational and maintenance costs by creating energy-efficient and centrally monitored and controlled systems that give organizations the much needed flexibility, scalability, security, convenience, comfort and of course good RoI. For security systems such as Electronic Access Control Systems (EACS), growth has been mainly due to their cost effectiveness in the segments such as small offices and manufacturing firms and educational institutions and lately the IT/ITeS sector. In case of video surveillance the growth of different applications such as public area surveillance, traffic monitoring, process monitoring, remote site monitoring, supple­menting access control and non security applications like fire protection are factors that contribute to increased deploy­ment. After the 26/11 terror attacks experts feel that the scope for video surveillance will improve further.

(courtesy: Honeywell Building Solutions)

According to Frost and Sullivan, India is viewed as one of the fastest growing markets wherein end-user growth, growing awareness and afforda­bility are creating huge market opportunities both at low and high ends of the market. “Growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 27 percent, the Indian Building Technology (BT) market is expec­ted to reach $1,293 million by 2012. IBMS and BAS are anticipated to witness good growth during 2007-2012. In 2012, IBMS and BAS would be 25.2 percent and 23.9 percent, respectively, of the total BT market,” said a report from Frost and Sullivan.

“Today the real estate developers are more aware of the rising energy costs and manpower costs that come out of manning complex and diverse services. We have seen that the adoption to IBMS is much higher today than about two years ago as more and more office buildings, malls are going in for the IBMS solutions,” said Nagpal, of Zicom.

Role and scope for SIs
There are too many system integrators involved in offering BMS. Many SIs involved in this space refuse to divulge details about their offerings citing the competition as reason. Some of the prominent SIs in this arena include Allied Digital, Sauterrace, Spectral Services, Firepro Systems and companies like Honeywell, Voltas, Zicom and Cisco also offer BMS to the real estate sector.

The scope for SIs are high in BMS, as they are the ones who drive the segment by enabling an end-to-end IT infrastructure in the building taking solutions from the vendors through various partnerships. “Today IP is emerging as the most effective and reliable communication mode. This holds true for IBMS as well. A host of products are available today that are compatible for IP communi­cations and most system architectures are built on the IP backbone. It is this synergy between the BMS solution provider and IT integrator that will grow in the days to come,” opined Nagpal of Zicom.

He claimed that Zicom historically has been an SI that has used state of the art technology products from various companies and brands in the solutions it has offered to its customers. “This experience has given us a keen understanding of exact needs of the customers in products. It helped us to introduce Zicom branded products into the Indian market that is tailor made to suit the Indian customer. We do have some partnerships with select SIs. We are open and welcome potential partners both in our SI and product selling business,” Nagpal said.

SIs will play a vital role in BT, as the market is shifting from being product-centric to solution-based integrated systems with high levels of customization, concluded Tarun Ramrakhiani of Honeywell.

NR Sethuraman
sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in

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