Siemens Building Technologies
From Devwiki
As a leading provider of building controls, fire safety and security system solutions, Siemens Building Technologies, Inc., makes buildings comfortable, safe, productive and less costly to operate. With U.S. headquarters in Buffalo Grove, Ill., Siemens Building Technologies employs 7,500 people and provides a full range of services and solutions from more than 100 locations coast-to-coast. Worldwide, the company has 29,000 employees and operates in more than 42 countries.
Our customer is the Insight development group in Buffalo Grove IL. Their customers are building and facilities managers across the world. Key markets for them include Healthcare Facilities, Colleges and Universities, Commercial office Buildings, Labs, Clean rooms and Schools.
Contents[hide] |
[edit] Objectivity Case History
This page needs expansion. Please update it and remove this banner when all fields are complete. |
[edit] Important
This information is an archive, so any use of the present sense in the text should be taken in the historical context, generally determinable from the Status section below.
[edit] Customer Information
- Customer: Siemens Building Technologies
- Project: Insight (the workstation part of the Apogee product line).
- Location:
- Territory:
- Industry Verticals:
- (look at that page)
- Technologies:
- (look at that page)
- Application Domain:
- Market Characterization: (Remove the irrelevant categories, then remove this clue)
- Number of developer licenses:
- Runtime license volume and type:
[edit] Status
- First Contact:
- Lead came from:
- Evaluation Start Date:
- Evaluation Finish Date:
- First Purchase Date:
- Deployment Date:
- Current Status:
- Can we talk about this customer and the product/project?
- Referenceable?:
[edit] Environment
- Hardware: Intel
- Operating System: Windows NT
- Precision: 32-bit
- Development language: C++
- Compiler: Microsoft.
- Third Party vendor tools:
- Rational Rose is used to store object models and generate Objectivity DDL.
- MFC is used for insight’s GUI
- Open Source tools:
[edit] The Project/Product
[edit] Project Background
- The original customer was Landis & Gyr. After a merger it became Landis & Staefa, which was then acquired by Siemens in 1998.
[edit] Project/Product Description
Landis originally sold building control systems to manage building HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning). This included sensors in the building and simple temperature controls. Over time building control became more sophisticated to include humidity, fire alarms, door locks/security, lighting etc. The newer systems included a building network to connect the various sensors to a controlling terminal. Landis’ “terminal” is now a PC running their software product called Insight (based originally on Windows 1.0). It has given them a competitive advantage but is now [1996] being re-written using Objectivity/DB.
Objectivity is used to store the network configuration information and collect historical information. Historical information (temperature, humidity etc.) is of particular importance for some of their key regulated customers such as pharmaceutical manufacturers, hospitals and food processing plants. The new, distributed Insight consoles have a seductive (marketable) Windows interface and can control anything from a small office to an entire college campus. Key installations include the Transamerica building in San Francisco, the United Center (Go Bulls!), Ohare International and the building our Chicago SE lived in.
Insight is a Workstation based portion of Landis’ System 600 APOGEE. System 600 APOGEE also includes all the network wiring sensors and controls for HVAC, Building security, Fire alarms etc.
The hallmark of Insight is its flexibility and accessibility. Its "sit anywhere," do anything architecture provides managers with endless opportunities to design cost reduction strategies and improve facility performance. Examples include:
- Monitor, command and program any controller on your system from any Insight workstation on the Management Network. System activity reports log every change made to the system by every Insight operator.
- Improve productivity through the flexibility of Window’s NT multi-tasking environment.
- Locate problems quickly using the System Profiler application. Analyze data using the Dynamic Plotter or export it to other analysis software programs.
- Troubleshoot quickly with the system’s 30 character naming convention and Insight’s industry-leading drag and drop navigation.
- Share information and files between Insight workstations.
- Quickly schedule facility usage using the Event Builder and Scheduler applications.
- Track, analyze and document system performance and efficiency with the Event Builder.
- Create reports using Report Builder and send reports to any Ethernet printer or file. Schedule report generation using Scheduler.
- Costs effectively add multiple advanced workstations.
- Assign each user unique system-wide access privileges based on name and password.
Insight also provides flexibility in access to building control from any workstation. Building Engineers/Managers can:
- Dial into the site-wide Management Network or Building Network from a remote Insight workstation.
- Dial into workstations from remote sites to report alarms or upload performance data.
Most importantly, the combination of Using System 600 APOGEE with its Insight workstations allows integration of all the following:
- Protective Isolation, Surgical suites, Critical care, Laboratory, Clean rooms, Fire/Life Safety, Security and access, Refrigeration, Power Management, Chillers, Boiler Controls, Process Control Systems, Air Handling, Units Security, Heat Pumps, Lighting, Programmable Logic Controllers and Paging.
Lastly, it is designed for future growth. The System 600 APOGEE with Insight includes the ability to:
- Add unlimited Advanced or Base Insights to the Management Network. Each Insight can support up to four Building Networks. Base Insights can grow into Advanced Insights by adding application options.
- Add up to five Open Processors to each Modular Building Controller.
- Access high-speed network optimized for real time data transfer.
- Leverage expanded memory and enhanced programming language to allow for larger programs and more data archiving routines at the controller level.
[edit] Buying Criteria
[edit] Business Priorities
- They are also very concerned about the company, its longevity and ability to support them long-term.
[edit] Technical Priorities
Their primary consideration was complex processing of highly inter-related data, plus fault tolerance. They thought that they would use distributed databases, but actually never really did. Everything is in a single/dual PC.
Features used:
- Indexes: Yes, they use our container level indexes but were forced to create their own global indexes, as ours were not available when they started designing Insight (Objectivity version 3.5).
- Maps: Yes
- Named Objects: No
- Associations: Yes, they use our bi-directional associations and referential integrity extensively.
- Iterators: Yes.
- Versioning: No.
- Predicate Query: Yes.
- SQL: Not yet but they are still considering for their reporting requirements.
- ODBC: Not yet but they are still considering for their reporting requirements.
- FTO: Yes planned for their new “Fault Tolerant Option” to be released next winter. [Caveat: Dropped later]
- DRO: Yes planned for their new “Fault Tolerant Option” to be released next winter. [Caveat: Dropped later]
- Schema Evolution: Currently in testing. They ran into several problems in version 4.0.
- Heterogeneity of O/S: No, although they can run on Windows NT or Windows 9X.
- Heterogeneity of Language: No
- Multithreading: Yes they implemented their own Mutex type of multithreading that now will not work with ver 5.0.
- ODMG interface: They have their own layer which follows the ODMG standard but do not use ours as they feel it is not robust enough.
- STL: No.
- Containers: They designed their container and Database usage with distribution and replication in mind. Physical entities are modeled as databases. These include an Insight Workstation, a campus network or a building network. Containers are use to group objects that make up a network or a workstation. These include points, alarms, trends and applications.
- Transactions: They do all short transactions within their GUI. One transaction is used to read and display the data and a separate transaction is used to update. All read transactions are MROW. They do not check to see if the data has changed since display and before update. The nature of the Insight application is that it is unlikely two Insights will be updating the same configuration simultaneously. If so, the last one in wins.
[edit] Competitors/Alternatives
- Originally they selected Raima but that company never delivered on its promised Window support so Landis reopened the evaluation. The subsequent benchmark revealed the power of Objectivity’s distribution capabilities. T
[edit] Why They Chose Objectivity
- Their two main reasons for picking Objectivity were the distributed architecture and price.
- Landis placed special value on the distribution capabilities of Objectivity.
- Since many of their larger customers such as universities and Hospitals are widely dispersed geographically with several control points, the ability to distribute building control across all these is critical. In addition the distribution capabilities enable Data Replication on which Landis also places value, so much so that they will soon offer their own fault tolerant option based on Objectivity’s. [Caveat: They later built their own, after finding problems with the original DRO/FTO implemnetation]
Q. Are we delivering value?
A. Yes, in terms of distribution and replication. They felt we might deliver more in terms of SQL support, which thus far they have chosen not to use primarily because they don’t know enough about it’s capabilities. They have extensive reporting requirements which up to now they are satisfying via alternative means. They are very happy with customer support which they rate 80% good.
Q. How has Objectivity helped differentiate their product in the marketplace?
A. It has enabled several new features to Insight making it the premier building control workstation on the market. The key areas of differentiation are Management, Access, Integration and Control. Many of these are detailed in the section titled “Project Purpose” above.
[edit] Partners
None.
[edit] Collateral
- Press Releases:
- Fliers:
- White Papers:
- Case Study: Covered on the objectivity.com site and in PC&A webinars.
- Other:
[edit] Contact Information
- Objectivity Rep:
- Customer Contact:
- Customer Phone:
- Customer Email:
- URL:
