Cisco has updated to its Smart Connected Buildings portfolio, a collection of services that provide for centralized management of buildings across global enterprise operations. The company first debuted its EnergyWise solutions last year.
The new technologies will allow corporations to view their energy use across thousands of buildings across the globe in real time. Instead of managing each building individually, companies will have the ability to manage multiple facilities at the same time.
"Commercial buildings consume up to 70 percent of our electric energy in North America and contribute about 40 percent of our greenhouse gases," explains Ed Richards, director of Worldwide Business Development, Smart Connected Buildings at Cisco. "Our group is focused on aggregation, command and control of carbon and energy use."
Among the new features is its Network Building Mediator 3.1, which links multiple building automation systems and protocols over Internet Protocol, allowing greater integration and visibility of energy flows across real estate and information technology.
The company said the new demand-management tools are part of its overall strategy to provide services designed to address energy concerns and help utilities more reliably and efficiently deliver power from generation to residential and business customers.
Cisco’s business offerings will now include its Mediator Manager 6300, which displays network presence information, providing operators real-time visibility into the status and accessibility of their facilities. Administrators can connect, monitor, aggregate and manage thousands of buildings via a central enterprise portal. Centralizing management of geographically dispersed buildings over an IP network increases operational efficiencies and reduces overall energy consumption and system downtime, and offers proactive system alerts for preventive maintenance of critical equipment.
The Network Building Mediator Manager also includes tools for defining global schedules and set points that apply across all of an enterprise's facilities, offering standardization in facility operations and increasing efficiencies in facility management. Global and unified schedules can be uniformly applied across all facilities and subsystems. Graphical equipment-status pages offer simple visibility into critical systems such as HVAC, lighting and metering.
The company’s building energy management solutions recently won it top honors from Greenpeace’s Cool IT Leaderboard list. It was also among the highest rated for its sustainability reporting.