The senior leadership of Tridium laid out its strategic vision for the company to expand its presence in the Internet of Things this morning during the opening of the 2014 Niagara Summit in Las Vegas. While maintaining its commitment to its core market in commercial building automation, the Richmond, Va.-based technology firm outlined plans to move into adjacent markets involving building and infrastructure facilities such as data centers, industrial buildings and smart cities.
“We’ve been connecting devices from the very beginning. We were building the Internet of Things before it was even called the Internet of Things,” said Chief Technology Officer John Sublett in addressing the crowd of roughly 1,500 comprised of customers, re-sellers and other participants in the fast-growing Niagara ecosystem.
Tridium remains committed to building automation as its core market, said President Nino DiCosmo, as demonstrated by its development of the next-generation Niagara 4 framework. That upgrade, which should enter the Beta testing phase later this year and launch by the first quarter of 2015, will provide ease-of-use upgrades to bolster the productivity of developers and re-sellers, superior visualization and reporting tools, a new user interface and security enhancements.
Although Niagara has been deployed in settings outside of building automation, the company has never made a major push into adjacent markets like the one DiCosmo described. In a collaboration with Geist, a provider of power, cooling, monitoring and management solutions, Tridium is moving into the data-center market, which is expected to see a 12% compounded annual growth rate through 2016. Likewise, Tridium has targeted industrial buildings and smart cities.
Between the electric grid, parking lots, traffic management, water and wastewater utilities, the smart-cities market accounts for a market of roughly $6 billion a year and is forecast to grow 16% annually through 2016. Tridium’s position in commercial and industrial buildings — which interface with public power grids, utilities and transportation systems — makes the sector a logical extension.
Among major news announced this morning, DiCosmo said the company has acquired DataEye, a cloud-based analytics engine for improving energy efficiency; a “brand refresh,” that includes a new logo, corporate colors, website, and social media outreach; and plans to build a Niagara marketplace to promote solutions provided by all players in the Niagara marketplace as well as to enable companies to share chunks of software.
View original article here: http://www.niagarasummit.com/tridium-broadens-market-from-building-automation-to-the-internet-of-things