Going with the flow

Engineered Systems, Jan, 2005 by Robert Beverly

Who's your cell phone provider?

Are you sure? A more difficult (maybe even impossible) question might be, who will your cell phone provider be in six months? If you can divine the answer to that question for sure, you should be spending your time day trading instead of doing this HVACR stuff. In the meantime, December brings the news that AT&T's wireless business is merging with Cingular. The next week, we read that Sprint and Nextel are planning their own nuptials. Sure, these are big players, fairly powerful on their own, but sometimes, conditions in an industry just make it ripe for consolidation.

As you may have noticed, another such industry is one of our own. The building automation sector apparently has also been ripe for consolidation ... for about ten years and counting now. I recently saw a chart forwarded from Randy Amborn at Trane; the chart summarized some major mergers and changes in the controls business since 1994. The list of involved companies from 1994 was on the left side. There were 23. The resulting companies as of 2004 were on the right side. There were 14, and that would've been under a dozen if not for three "newer" companies added to the group. You hear about a merger every now and then, and it might seem like an occasional and isolated event, but when you see the long-term trend, the industry momentum is unmistakable.

WITH A WAVE, YOU HAVE A CHOICE

These days, the effects of such a wave are visible all the way down on the facility level as well. The relentless pursuit of efficiency pares down players in a market, and likewise it searches for opportunities to streamline the flow of building management information.

Specifically, owners and designers are starting to find room to simplify and coordinate some parts of the traditional BAS and the life safety system. Joanna Turpin starts the year with part one of a look at the possibilities and challenges presented by the integration of these two systems. A seminar at last year's BuilConn by recent ES author Dave Branson, P.E. planted the seed for this coverage. While codes still vary and the usual project-specific factors still come into play, I think you'll see that there's a lot of logic (and benefit) behind examining the potential of unifying these systems in many cases.

Even the coordination of those two sys terns is part of the larger wave you've read about here before--the increased integration of traditional HVAC controls within the overall facility system controlling IT, HVAC, life safety security, and so on. The technology is catching up to what owners can imagine in terms of the most straightforward way to manage multiple systems in single and multiple facilities. And with that technological wave, owners will be able to ride it to better operations, or ignore it and see the worth of their investments level off, or dip relative to the competition.

More about this next month, where you'll see the trend continue at the AHR Expo, and in the special supplement discussing the third BuilConn event set for this sprint.

SOLUTIONS AND RESOLUTIONS

When we talk about resolutions, they're usually personal--to quit smoking, or to exercise more often. But what about professional resolutions? Here at the magazine, we'll strive to catch the typos earlier, look for new avenues to bring you useful editorial, and continue the struggle to abolish the use of the word "impact" as a verb unless we're talking about teeth.

Got any engineering resolutions to work toward in the new year? E-mail them to me at beverlyr@bnpmedia.com. Sharing a few professional goals might help others reach a little higher in 2005. And no, merging with Nextel might be profitable, but that's not the kind of thing we're looking for.