Smart Spaces Digital Twin Demonstration

so this is the home page of our portal so the pool tool is where you manage our um software platform so the smart building operating system which is our smart spaces product you administer the application which is our smartphone ios and android app from this portal and one of the core features of this portal is our digital twin um so if i go from left hand side navigation i select digital twin on the left hand side this opens up the basement and today i'm presenting the future works in slow which is an ashby capital building it's one of our recent smart buildings and the uh key attributes are the this is one of the very few live data digital twins where all the data points from this building are captured within this model um for instance if i go through the right hand side i can talk through a few of the features so we have access control here that enables access to the building that manages access to the building and we will demo some of that later alongside the lighting control hvac controls and climate controls energy reporting analysis so and analyzing any devices within the building or any temperature or flow rates etc the support within the building the lifts desk sensors so if you're um deploying flexible working arrangements and agile working we have desk sensors deployed we have a booth sensor for call booths or for breakout areas we have our indoor air quality sensors we have our occupancy sensors we have our occupancy sensors that can target exactly where an individual is within the space and i'll show you that a bit later ampr so automatic number plate recognition to manage the capacity of the car park device points which is how we scan all the points within a building and understand that the full make up of the data available parking sensors and so we understand with people using the ev charging bays or what the capacity is within the spaces in the basement and then info which i'll show you a bit later which is the documentation so whilst i'm on this level um it'll be worth sort of diving into the ampr so what this does this loads up a live availability of the car park um so here you can look at all the different um occupiers and what their current capacity is within the car park um this is very useful is this real is this live or is this a mock-up it's live so this is live data coming through from our system um the whole of the future works is sort of a live asset um so everything you'll see in here today is a live demo of our building in slough great um brilliant so if i um then come out of this and i click into the parking sensors um you can see there the little red dot that means there's a car parking so it's just a single car in that ev charging bay at present um and the benefit of this is that wireless sensors now have got to the cost point where they're very um cost effective to deploy um and it helps manage your building effectively and so with the things like the the bv charging bays that are in the uh basement um we do we don't want like the electrical vehicle owners to uh squat in these spaces you know you want to have a fair use policy and this is an effective way of managing that um you can actually look historically by going back through the calendar um of exactly how that space is used and who do you work with on on the sensors or do you make your own yeah so no we we don't manufacture any of our own sensors other than the indoor air quality sensor which is not manufactured it's just white labeled for us we tend to really focus on the software um it's really the key skill set our business deploys is integration as you can imagine in this building there's probably around 25 different systems that we're integrated with and so that's the core of our product is bringing all the disparate data sets back into a single pane of glass which is the digital twin yeah and which manufacturers do you prefer for the sensors interesting i mean it we do bench test a whole host of different sensors so the parking sensor there is a bosch sensor that we've been using um obviously when you see a name like bosch applied to the sensor you know it's going to be good quality um it's been used globally uh for a long time so it gives us a lot of confidence but still we'll want to deploy that sensor into a live environment and understand that um yeah exactly um how it performs and we've found that you know different battery-powered sensors we start to understand their battery life and um how much maintenance is required obviously we're big fans of battery powered sensors but we do also realize over time there's a maintenance and also you know an impact on the environment um because these batteries need to be disposed of so we tend to evaluate each technology every time we deploy it within the building and so this is the uh the architectural model so it's the shepherd robinson building um it's developed in about 2017 so one of the key things i'd like to get across is that by no means was our technology in the building from day one it was it was a retrofit and uh retrofit is um way more achievable than you think um especially when you deploy our software what we like to think is sometimes our software sort of upgrades the building if you've got a building that was developed in the last 10 years we can deploy our software and it gets very close to some of the leading buildings out there so as i rotate around the building um you can see um you know all the different terraces there um and we have live data points within the building so we can um see um live data and this is live actually this is pulling through so actually at present there's no energy being generated or harvested by the uh the solar pv um which actually is a common thing actually you've noticed that across our portfolio of buildings um the pv that never seems to be generating as much power as we'd expect and that's actually something now we can create a report for the client and for them to investigate so this is the uh this is the external so when we come down into the reception um what i can do is i can just actually go down to the ground floor and by navigating there on the right hand side we can come into the reception here we have a first person so here i can navigate around come into reception rotate round and see there i've just um clicked on the the turn style so what has happened is is that my system's connected to the access control system and it can tell the disabled gate is uh locked there we can actually enable that so that will enable that to unlock um for a period to allow someone access to the building and um we will also have the the ability um to manage like the card holders the app users that have access to that turnstile and that's the same for every asset within the building we break the building down into its individual components and then you can create groups of those components with permissions so a lot of the permissions i have in the digital twin are identical in the app so if i'm allowed to unlock that door in the app i'm also allowed to unlock that door um through the uh digital twin as well so just so i can understand this isn't just a record a digital twin in the sense of showing the designs of where things are you can actually control things in real time and open gates and that's exactly right yeah that's it so um essentially if i click on like a luminaire and here i'll get real-time status of um the of the current lighting parameters within the building um so here i have the ability to dim the lights etcetera and so that's if i go up to the floor for instance if i go up to the second floor um i can sort of show you some more of that in action are you able to monitor the usage by the client or the building manager of all of this kit and how much they're actually using it looking at it yeah yeah so in terms of the digital twin um because it's managed for energy reporting so the bills are calculated to charge the tenants it gets an incredible amount of usage and the same for understanding the occupancy as well so for instance if i click on these desks those green desks that mean they're free and i could actually go and use that desk now so you can use this as a tool to understand the occupants in the office and make sure you've got a desk there and also once you've selected a desk you'll be able to see by scrolling down here the environmental parameters so for instance humidity is quite low at 26 like levels at 14 temperature is 20 celsius now why this is important to us is if i click on the phone call unit above that desk we can sort of see the uh the correlation between the two um so what we're really hoping is that that's providing as near as 20 it gets a 21 i've got 19.2 so that's the sensor on the return air flow um but at the desk i'm delivering 19.2 which is within our acceptable range um so the great thing about this is if someone from one of these desks calls down to reception and says that i'm slightly cold or hot they can actually point them to the digital twin or to the app and they can see actually we're delivering a comfortable temperature and if they want they can actually tweak that temperature themselves so they do have the facility to just warm it up slightly or cool it down slightly so that was going to be my next question was who has access to what we're looking at now yeah so i'm logged in as the client so i've got full access of my asset um if i log in as a user so someone who uses the building i'll only be restricted to the areas that i'm working so for instance it might be just this breakout area you can see here or just this half of the floor plate that i leased i wouldn't see the car park information i wouldn't see the information reception i wouldn't see the information in the plant room it would only be the assets for which i've leased and that's all managed for our user management system the neat thing about that is that it's completely um synchronized with the app so my app access uh so my access to getting into this floor using the smart spaces app um is is totally synchronized so if i get uh create an account in the app i get an account for the digital twin so so do they use the app for other things in terms of the occupiers booking parking spaces or seeing if the ev bay is is vacant um presumably they have smart spaces for that delay that's right that's that clear yeah so so the app is probably what you'd call the more transactional piece so it's it's yeah it's that's how you access the car park that's how most of the temperature changes will go through the um app rather than through the digital twin albeit they are completely synchronized right okay so if i close some of this down um one of the other nice things we do is that you know there's an awful lot of documentation that's um collated when this building was developed now again like i said this is a retrofit so what we've done um for instance on the lighting system we've gone through all the different documentation that was provided when the building was developed and it's all linked in here so these are all the um maintenance documents for that particular asset which is the luminaire and so when you need to service that luminaire so it needs to be replaced or there's any emergency lighting failure this is your first port of coal um and further on from that so i've got the documentation here um i can actually then raise the support ticket on here as well so i could come into here click a new issue and raise a support ticket on that particular asset so you're really sort of centralizing the management of this space does that link through to the suppliers or whoever's responsible if you're you have a preferred electrician to come in that's right yeah exactly so it's rooted so it means that different topics go to different people so if it's an fm query it'll go off to the building's fm department if it's an electrical query it could go straight to the building engineer and one of the key aspects is a sort of responsibility because typically in a traditionally leased space there might be areas that's the responsibility of the tenant there's areas that's responsibility of the landlord and so um we can define that in our roles and permission so we can say if someone reports a cleaning item within the demise which is this office here that would go through to the office manager whereas if it was outside in the reception it would be the building manager so it's just making sure all the queries are going to the right people um but it's centralizing it i think that's the case is that we call this a single pane of glass which comes from sort of the airline industry where you have a cockpit where we've got lots of different uh data coming at you from all different dials we can centralize that into one digital display which coordinates it um it's doing the same thing with your fm you know you're coordinating the management of the building by having lots of different people access it for different purposes which is sort of automation in a way so here i've got the lighting control sorry have you seen are you able to track the sort of results of this in terms of time saved or cost saved in terms of building the business case for this for further buildings within a portfolio or for other clients what's the impact of this yeah i mean typically what we're looking at is an energy saving so we can see um that we've today on some of our buildings we've saved up to 20 um of the energy that was consumed before we deployed our digital twin and by really raising a lot of the issues to the surface so that the occupier the manager can see exactly how the building's performing and then in terms of the the support queries what's really nice is we do have the ability to track how long tickets have been left open how quick they're being closed um and so you can really understand how effective you are really providing great customer service within your building yeah and so um as we sort of scroll around this floor plate um we have a number of different sensors deployed if i zoom down to this area here which is a breakout area we have another sensor deployed which is our booth sensor so this is looking to see whether these moves are free and again i get all the different environmental parameters around how that so they're slightly warmer there at 19.9 celsius um i come out of this and then come over to this meeting room here we can actually look at something that's really fundamental at the moment with the advent of covid is the um really making sure that we're providing a healthy working environment and so we have a sensor deployed within the meeting room which allows us to monitor the air quality within the space so i'm just going to rotate round here so you can see the meeting room so here i've clicked on the sensor um indoor air quality iaq yep that's right um so what i've got here is breathable volatile organic compounds um so these are things like ammonia formaldehyde they're um they bleach off of fabrics um or paint when when a fit out is first completed and actually what we've seen is the baseline come down over time um but being under one part per million is superb um and that's exactly you know the sort of environment we want to provide why does that go up after eight o'clock in the morning um that's a really good question um sometimes we find that actually people have walked into that room um so it could be it could be your aftershave one of the funniest ones is the banana if you have a banana and you open a banana and eat a banana in that room it sends the uh volatile gamet compounds um off the charts um so yeah there's there are some funny anomalies i said there's another similar one where um with the pm which we'll come down to in a second which is a particular matter when the cleaners go around you sort of understand when they're hoovering because it's pushing some of the up particles up into the air and that's usually quite good because you've got an effective filtration system the system will extract that um those particles from there and clean them out um so here humidity in the room at the moment the the co2 is at five uh five to eight parts per million which is within our six acceptable range if i click that i can actually see those ranges there so excellent it's between 400 and 699 and so really there we we we're sort of showing that yeah the air is being changed as frequently as possible um and there's quite an interesting angle on this where at present a lot of buildings running their air handling units at 100 percent um to clear the air through the space as fast as possible as often as possible and to reduce um the risk of covid um being distributed through the space and and what we can see is we can keep the co2 is really low we know the air is fresh we know the air is changing frequently enough we could actually reduce that air handling units um down to say maybe 70 monitor the co2 and if we keep that baseline we're not wasting the energy i'm just changing the air too often unnecessarily um but yeah so really acceptable range there um we have a synthetic co2 which is to keep the uh the laser co2 measurement in check um we have an overall indoor air quality um score so we're looking at um making sure that the temperatures close to as 20 celsius as possible we're around 40 percent humidity our co2 is below 600 parts a million and we're providing a comfortable um environment um we also have air pressure we have particulate matter and particular matter 10 is like sort of dust you would see that's visible dust in the um air and then you go right down to pm1 which is completely invisible uh to the human eye and then pm 2.5 and pm 2.5 is the important one here because that's the one the government report on so we can actually get data um on the the outside air quality and compare it to the indoor air quality and i think with return to the office evidencing that um is a key aspect and we've found that in some of our central london assets you know we can have 12 times better air quality inside than outside because the pollution and that's even with the reduced sort of traffic at the moment so it's even more important when things will pick up and uh yeah there's more pollution in the atmosphere and so yeah that's that's in a really good range and again i can click on that and i can get the ranges there yeah one thing that um people say about uh data in buildings these days is that um there's almost too much and people don't know what to do with uh all the data that's being thrown off by sensors and things like that do you find this is is a sort of usable way of of presenting that that people aren't overwhelmed is it a very labor intensive job to keep on top of all this yeah no it's not really i mean the great thing is it's actually in the app and in the app we make it slightly more digestible for the average user here this is sort of what you'd call your advanced view where you get a lot of the detail um we summarize this in the app um and so it's very quick to understand uh yes actually um how the space is performing but necessarily overwhelming people with lots of charts and graphs yeah and i mean talking more generally about the the whole sort of smart building movements that um developers are um at last sort of looking at this but they don't necessarily understand what they want or how many integrations how many systems they've got legacy systems which can be a pain to to integrate with um what was the process for uh deploying this in a retrofit how long did it take what sort of costs are we looking at yeah so it took around about six months um to get this online um and that's really um first of all looking at the building systems we sort of what we perform what is called a gap analysis so we look at how far away these systems are to being um an enabled smart enabled so being able to support our software and then that throughout that six month period we deployed um a lot of different um technologies and adapters to be able to extract the data and and link it to our cloud platform um and you know this is this building's bms system is a very common uh bms which is in probably you know up to 60 percent of uk building so it really helps us um sort of um open up the market to be able to deploy this software yeah and are you talking eye-watering amounts of money to deploy this or yeah no it's definitely it's um it's really cost effective i wouldn't want to say numbers now because i wouldn't want someone to come to me and say oh you said that building was this price because obviously buildings are very different um so we quote every project on a project by project basis um but what i can say is it's really cost effective now you think you know this is a great building a great asset but by no means is it going to be like one of london's skyscrapers like 22 bishopsgate where we also have our software deployed um but yeah it fits into the budget for this building in slough is there a lot of sort of upskilling of training to get the the users the fm team the staff for the client to to understand how to to drive a machine like this not really i mean the the great thing is i think what's happened with the software is it's made so for instance the reception team have this open on their desktop day in day out so when they welcome you into the building our visitor management system is part of this digital twin and they book you into the building through this system so it means that the system's open and used all day by different roles and because of those roles and permissions we train people for different aspects so the building engineer for instance he wouldn't use the visitor management system he would just use this dashboard and i think by creating roles and responsibilities throughout the building management team they just train on a sort of a subset of functionality in the app rather than the entire app itself albeit because the system is so comprehensive the asset managers of the building they tend to actually use more of the functionality on the system they're not going to be booking people into the building day in day out but they want to see a holistic view of all the data in one place and so the training varies between individuals but we like to think the way we've designed this way we've designed the app we've kept it as simple as possible and what was the first one that you um that you deployed you installed for somebody 160 old street for great portland estates and actually interestingly enough that was on our version 1.0 what i'm showing you today is version 2.0 we're currently uh working on a project um to deploy our version 2.0 there now and how long ago was that the first one uh that was 2016 so yeah quite a while back now um yeah we've been doing this for a while um because we've we've heard over the years that you know bim and digital twins is is a great concept it's a great notion it gets a lot of hype a lot of fanfare but people don't necessarily buy into it and use it they find the the the use cases the the sort of real world um take up it hasn't been as great as people might might expect given all the hype um are you seeing that change is there an uptick in in developers actually wanting this on the ground oh 100 400 i'd say is what our inquiries have increased it since covered um 400 yeah yes it's been yeah it's shocked us actually um it tends to be the the phone's ringing in the office um we're getting invited to to pitch on products i think i think the price point i think where you mentioned that you know i think actually i can understand that previously it has been hard to justify the cost but where the cost points now come down um and then actually you do have so many different systems in these buildings to rationalize it all in one place so you can sort of comprehend how your building is performing um yeah it's worth it and uh so that's why i think that that popularity has increased so much yeah and you mentioned energy you mentioned air quality what are the other things that uh that landlords and developers are asking for i'd say oh yeah so occupancy is key for instance if i switch over to this window here this is our office and so here we deploy a sensor that shows exactly how people are using the space um so you can see in the right hand side that blue dot there is where i was positioned this here is the team downstairs on the the lower floors what this is really used is to understand how the space is occupied and i think with you know the return to work every landlord is going to be keen to understand how many um people are within the office and you know is the office going to be used the same way as it was before and by using these sensors and monitoring these positions of the individuals and we don't actually know who these individual individuals are we can actually look to see whether we could change the layout to the office to actually allow for more people have more breakout areas um and we see that really you know the future of um managing real estate effectively will be um occupancy uh data and that's the same on this model here so if we go into the uh the desk senses again here um looking at the historical uh data of when the space was used um we can go right back on these sensors and look at the uh the occupancy data over a period of time um yeah and you mentioned about not knowing who they are how do you handle data privacy at the moment yeah so when you uh consent to use the uh the app you are signing up to our privacy policy um we actually collect very minimal personal data the personal data we are collecting is purely for security purposes you are that your access passes your phone and is the app so we need to make sure you are who you say you are um so that's the key for around the personal data there but then all this occupancy data and the analytics that we have around how the space is performing that's completely anonymized we don't have any concept of the individual even those sensors that can pinpoint the position of someone within the space um we don't um yeah actually know who that individual is and i think that's a key aspect of this it's really uh to manage the space effectively rather than monitor uh individuals within the space and one of the other big sort of um talking points with data at the moment is around standardization um especially around energy there's lots of different certification schemes there's there's different um benchmarking systems which it if it carries on that way with every different organization and institution having its own way of measuring things it's not going to be very useful for for the industry i don't think because are you seeing any any improvement on that how do you manage that yeah definitely i think that the neighbours scheme is here always makes me laugh because it comes from australia and it's called neighbours but it's uh the the neighbours scheme will allow for standardized real-time reporting of energy data across uh commercial assets so um that is the key to getting that standardization so you can compare buildings and building performance um what's great about digital twin is that it will aggregate all that data and then we can submit that data and present that data in that standardized format and i think that that's probably one of the best selling points for digital twin um is that it can collate data from disparate systems and standardize it into a format that then can be compared asset to asset but also um work with schemes like neighbours of brienne yeah yeah that's great and and you said your inquiries are up 400 percent how many um have you got installed and how many people are you talking to at the moment yeah i mean in terms of talking to people possibly probably 30 property companies um we're deploying globally as well so that that's great for a business like mine based in london so yeah we're deploying across the world and that's the great thing about technology like this um we worked on a big office campus in central london where we could deploy through the cloud we didn't have to have to go boots on ground which was great um and in terms of buildings now we're on our iphone app we're up to around 20 million square feet now so yeah so well over 100 buildings which is amazing yeah and how do you do the installation then if you're working remotely and you don't have to be on the ground you've got you've got hardware there and sensors and things going on is that local installers yeah local installers we can send them directly to the property management company they're battery powered we have instructions on how to apply those sensors um and yeah we have software that you can install onto your network which will be able to create the cloud link to give you this kind of integration um and where we've been really fortunate is the larger property companies you work with they have teams that are very able to do this um i think where we have more boots on ground deployments are the smaller property companies where they don't tend to have those teams they won't have an internal i.t team for instance so that means that we have to uh yeah visit the building but that's fine you know we are set up to do that um you know our company's fast approaching 40 employees so we do have that support framework to be able to um assist with that and how difficult is it to to install new systems with with legacy systems and get all the different switches and wires and pipes and all that tricky stuff sorted no yeah it can be i mean if you my wife always jokes around my phone the sort of photos i have of risers and comms cabinets and well i mean over the years we've been doing this i think when we really first started doing this around 2015 we would walk into a building and our minds would melt on the state of the uh the the systems within a building we'd see um multiple we had one building where it had 14 adsl connections that every time someone won the maintenance contract in the building over the past five years they'd put a new adsl connection in to monitor the network externally so obviously cyber security risk there and so what we did there is remove all those 14 connections get a single secure connection all into the building we rationalize these networks so you typically in one of these buildings you're going to have an access and control and cctv network you're going to have a bms network you can have a lighting control network um we want to segregate those secure those and then we link those to our system and that's when we're able to actually extract the data so um yeah it's been quite scary but then other buildings which has been amazing you know um this is what i say around how the projects would be so different you get there and it's all organized um you know the documents and all the assets have um stored in such a fashion it's really easy for us to extract them and add them to the digital twin um the network secure they've got managed i.t um so it really is it's almost like a lottery uh and so where i said about those inquiries you're working uh with these property companies at the moment it's we're running around these buildings performing a gap analysis and some clients have been exceptionally lucky they've got all the kit and we can switch the software on in as quick as a month um maybe even quicker and then they've got other buildings where like in all reality this is a probably a year's project to bring it up to speed um but what's really nice is what we've formulated from this is a set of guidelines now um so you can contract with my company and you don't need to buy the software you can buy our consultancy service which is smart enabling your building so making sure all these systems are ready for software like ours and we use open protocol so none of this is closed protocol so you know sadly as i hate to admit it you know as more competitors hit the market um it's open so um they'll be able to interrupt with the uh the building as well and i think that's that way forward to be honest with you i think the only way we're really gonna see a huge innovation in this space is through adopting open technologies and we're dead against uh you know proprietary technologies being deployed within buildings absolutely and one of the things we hear about property is how complicated it is in terms of the procurement all the different suppliers the different materials contractors consultants um and i've heard it said in the past that um that there is a sort of um systemic blockage against uh new ways of doing things and more energy efficient systems lighting whatever it is because of that fractured procurement process that if a building is being redeveloped or a new build then that consultant will not be interested in the maintenance of the the lighting that goes in because that gets passed on to somebody else and they don't want to save or spend the extra money on on that system and and so you know it takes a an exceptionally um forthright developer at the top to insist on this throughout that it can't be uh negated and dropped in the process are you finding that performance is having to be turned on its head to to enable this yeah i think you're totally right and actually five years ago that was definitely the case what we've noticed is developers i think really being forced by the you know the fun that might back the developer or um just the way the market's moving um to bring in the um the the in-use companies the property management company the fm companies our us as a software company that's an in-news product um earlier on so you know as early as say reba stage two or three um and be there for the whole process because i think you know a lot of uh com property companies have been sick of picking up an asset once it's been developed and like you say um the handover has not been worked really well none of the systems work especially lifts lifts tend to be a point of contention so what we're doing now is from reba stage two onwards um yeah bringing these partners in and consulting and i think the best thing about our software is in use software so we're incentivized for this to work for the lifetime of the building we're not there just to say oh no it works on day one when the building pcs and the developer hands over the keys to the new owners it's actually there um for the for the lifetime and i think that plus bringing all the parties in and so for instance you asked about the training earlier on some of our buildings um with the property management company who will be taking our software over is already using the software um before the building's complete because the 3d model is available um not all the systems are because they're not all been installed but we can see a current status of the systems um by uh linking them up so you'll be able to see actually on floor two 20 of uh 50 phone call units have been installed so you've sort of got a progress tracker there as well and that's we've actually prefer that because it there's less work to do at the end of the project it's much more incremental and it's a lot more manageable yeah yeah absolutely so where do you see this getting to then presumably you've got product development ideas in the next year or two what can you tell us about what we might be able to see yeah so most of our focus now is automation so we are looking for the system to diagnose issues within the building um predominantly at the moment looking for the energy side so um working with energy consultants but also to formulate um a algorithm that will be able to target all the buildings within our system and come up with the anomalies that need to be solved to save energy that's that's where our core focus is now i think the last sort of four or five years been getting the data into the system the next four or five years will be using that data um to improve the performance of the buildings how close are you to to automation then well we have it already um but it's quite rudimentary you know it's more around occupancy you know if this floor is not being used we can disable the ac or turn the lights off um we can also alter the schedule based on booking so if someone books the space we'll bring the schedule on and in line with that if the space is not booked over a week so that's our sort of simple rules engine we have deployed at present what we're looking at now is looking at every single data point um and then running an algorithm against that to understand if things are operating outside of the design designed operations yeah and you're obviously quite advanced with with this and a lot of people are just starting to think about uh building digital twin into their systems uh what does the competition look like for you are there big players that are moving into this from big tech or other other startups that or you know independent businesses that are doing this yeah one of our clients described it to us quite nicely the other day they said that you've approached this from the app first so we originally we designed our smartphone app with which was the smart building app that has all these controls and then because we've linked every system possible to that app when we then got our hands on the 3d model we're like well we can link lists of our data points and have a complete picture of the building which is our smart building operating system a lot of our competitors have gone the other direction so they've been in the bms world so very much the engineering side of things not so much the end user but now they are sort of coming towards um deploying apps um that are linked to their bms so we sort of got in two different directions uh which is interesting um we personally believe obviously the the user experience for the occupier um having that simple easy to use interface works for everyone we probably feel that um some bms systems can be overly complicated yeah yeah and from your from your own business ownership point of view what what do you think the um that the plan is is are you looking at an exit do you think there'll be some big global company coming and snap you up or are you looking to raise yes that's a really interesting question um we've we've never done a fundraise so we're with what we call a bootstrapped company so business uh it's founded by me and my brother tom um we're still very much involved in the business day-to-day uh we really enjoy what we do and so at the present we it's all about growth and just um adding more buildings to the system we're really excited to take the to get these buildings online internationally um i couldn't say no there won't be an exit in the future but at present it's really just that sort of growing the business uh the the fundraising runs an interesting one um because we've done so well to get where we are without the fundraising and we do love being fully in control of our destiny um yeah it'd have to be a very attractive offer uh but not ruling it out completely yeah yeah and um how much are you are you turning over then or how much do you expect to this year i wouldn't want to share that information today if that's okay right right but are you profitable oh yeah yeah we've been profitable since uh 2010 so even our first year of business albeit it was a minimal amount of revenue um we were like on a minimum wage uh back then um yeah we've been profitable throughout the lifetime business we've been very very fortunate um our background it was uh writing software marriott's a european booking engine for um meeting rooms and conferencing and that's when we first started to get introduced to smart building technologies and ibeacon and those sort of things and by having that background developing that kind of software it it gave us the revenue um and to really scale up and develop this software and at present the majority of our profits are still going into r d but we're definitely burying the fruits of that now we're seeing the benefits of that as the business uh scales up yeah and flipping that into to r d for developers and how are they um when you're sitting across the table and you're talking about deploying this and buying in software extra kits and sensors and what have you are they seeing this as an investment are they seeing this as part of the technology budget they've got or how is that working out in the business plans for for those developers yeah i think there's an investment in technology to make sure that their product is relevant so i feel that sometimes on the newer developments we come out of the marketing budget to a certain extent because if they can provide an app and a portal like this to manage the property it's hot it's very attractive um to the occupiers moving in um one of the things that's happened is we were second guessing the occupier for a long time so um we were developing this for landlords um who are then but the main users would be the occupiers of the building on some of our large assets uh like 22 bishopsgate hanover square um we've now building the app for the occupier so we've got um the new app for beasley and we have a new app for one of the the occupiers at hanover square um and so there they're gonna that they're sort of taking the software to the next level um and so that's that's been fantastic for us yeah brilliant before we wrap up is there anything any clever features you want to want to show us that we haven't seen well i think one of the key things is that we find that actually lifts um are one of the hardest systems to integrate into our platform um and so we've recently launched the the lift control um device within here so if i go down to the ground floor i can uh select the lifts here um we have full control of the lifts uh we've found that actually like you can um also re-synchronous lifts as well so if you find that one's being used more than the other um you can actually um put a preference towards the other cars and i think that's gonna um really keep the devices like operating for longer over time because um yeah you can you have even use we frequently find chillers on the roof of buildings uh some of the chillers never come into sequence because it's only when the building's at full load what we can do is resequence them so the one that hasn't has got less miles uh starts to get used more and i think we will definitely move away from sort of time-based servicing to in-use and so looking at actually how many miles or how many times that something's been used rather than just because it's six months replacing filters or bearings unnecessarily yeah yeah absolutely much more uh efficient use of the assets yeah and that's been fascinating and thank you for uh for being so candid and and showing us inside and smart spaces digital twin um in operation dan drogman thank you very much for your time thanks very much

Channel: PlaceTech

Views: 1,094

Keywords: smart spaces, tech, proptech, technology, software, demonstration, digital twin, demo, real estate, office, offices, office space, wellbeing, flexible workspace, flex space

Id: vE3XNXaH9lo

Length: 44min 15sec (2655 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021