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We begin our interview with Scott Cochrane, President and CEO of Cochrane Supply and Engineering, with the question, “Where’s the APP?” The answer to that question is becoming the measurement of success and the driver to both the user’s experience and their bottom line. Scott’s underpinning principle is to “bring technology into the building space.”
Scott continues, “We’re not dealing with the maintenance staff anymore. The conversation now is with the C-Suite who has an entirely different mentality and set of expectations. And, it’s not just about saving energy anymore. It’s about creating business efficiencies. Distributors must have IT competence. The same goes for Vendors.”
Make sure to read Scott’s article “The OT versus IT Debate — A Temporary Construction Network helps Stanford University stay ahead of the curve” in the March edition of Automated Buildings
Scott extended a special offer to the ControlTrends Community: Use the code ControlTrends when registering for CONTROLS-CON 2019, this May 2nd and 3rd at Detroit’s MotorCity Casino Hotel
One Response
I read Scott Cochrane’s article at Automated Buildings. I’ve been involved in a couple of projects where temporary networks were necessary, so I found Stanford’s solution interesting. The article left me with a couple of questions/thoughts about using IP versus MSTP controllers and how vendors and IT departments handle them. Disclaimer: I’ve never actually used these type of IP controllers.
First, from what I have seen Ethernet can be daisy-chained between these field level IP controllers. However, many IT departments require that each IP device, BAS or not, have its own jack or be homerun back to a data room. Vendors need to discuss policies with the IT department before implementing IP devices.
Second, how do these IP controllers fit into the facility’s current IT scheme, particularly in a campus environment? For example, a few years ago I was involved in a project on a college campus in which the building had over 600 VAV controllers. The campus IP addressing standard is the second octet of the IP address indicates which VLAN it is part of (HVAC had its own) and the third octet is unique to the building. Obviously if these 600+ VAVs plus other devices were all IP it wouldn’t work with this standard. Is IPv6 a possible solution for this scenario?