SkySpark® Applicable Verticals

A truly intelligent building measures understands and responds to its own behavior. Achieving this level of intelligence requires more than just the latest, efficient HVAC and lighting systems. The building needs the ability to automatically analyze all of the data produced by its equipment systems, the resources it consumes and the external environmental conditions it is subject to. Control systems on their own simply aren’t designed to accomplish this.

SkySpark collects, manages, and automatically performs analytics on the data from building automation systems, metering systems, lighting, weather, and other smart devices to identify issues, patterns, deviations, faults and opportunities for operational improvements and cost reduction.

SkySpark informs operators of issues via a complete suite of Apps that automatically visualize operational data and highlight patterns,

correlations, and KPI’s, all without requiring custom development of graphical screens. With SkySpark once your data is connected you are ready-to-go.

For applications that do require customized reports, SkySpark combines the efficiency of its built-in, ready-to-go Apps with the ability to create customized data presentations with View Builder. View Builder provides a point-and-click tool that lets you create your own customized visualizations, displays, and Apps and turn those views into reports and for automated emailing.

SkySpark helps building owners and operators “find what matters” in the vast amount of data produced by today’s smart systems across facilities of all types. In the following sections, we will provide more detail on specific applications for SkySpark.

Industrial facilities have their own special requirements based on their unique use and production output, but in the end, their equipment systems produce huge volumes of time series data making SkySpark an ideal solution for analyzing and optimizing processes and the environmental systems that support those processes. SkySpark’s Folio database accepts high-frequency sensor data with millisecond precision.

Perhaps most important for industrial applications is that SkySpark enables you to leverage your domain knowledge to implement rules, KPI’s, and algorithms that fit your highly specific needs. By combining full user-programmability with a comprehensive library of analytic functions (over 500 and growing) SkySpark provides you with the tools you need to address applications of all types across virtually any type of device and equipment data.

SkySpark has been successfully applied in a variety of industrial applications. You can find a recent case study here:

SkySpark provides a complete suite of tools for energy analysis and reporting applications and is often used as a stand-alone Energy Analysis application. Its supports applications involving the full range of energy resources including electricity, alternative energy generation including solar and storage, natural gas, oil, and water – basically any resource that is metered. Some of the major features of the SkySpark Energy tools include:

Once your rate model is defined, the Tariff Engine turns your energy consumption data into highly accurate costs. The Energy App then allows you to quickly overlay energy use and cost data to provide clear insight into the correlation between usage and cost. And, in case you are wondering, SkySpark supports a wide range of currencies.

Healthcare facilities have unique needs including stringent regulatory requirements and mission-critical systems that are literally responsible for life and death. Performance of those systems matters – not only for efficient use of energy resources and cost control – but also to insure occupant safety and comfort and manage risk. Again, the common theme is sensor and equipment data – lots of it. Hospital staffs need to be able to quickly and efficiently work with data from diverse systems produced by different suppliers and quickly find issues, patterns, deviations and faults in represented in that data.

SkySpark has been deployed across millions of square feet of healthcare facilities with great results. Here are a few of our Healthcare Case Studies at these links:

Multi-site retail portfolios have unique needs related to their equipment systems and the responsibilities of the teams that manage them. First, there is the sheer number of sites and equipment systems and data samples generated. Think of a portfolio with 1000 sites, each with 10 HVAC units, each with 25 data points (sensors and control points), with each point-producing 1 data sample every minute. That’s 360 million data samples per day! In the course of a year that’s 131 Billion data samples. Talk about BIG DATA. SkySpark unique database, historian and analytics technology handles projects of that size with ease. But an effective solution for multi-site retail operators requires more than the ability to collect, manage, analyze that data. An effective analytics solution needs to provide the tools to help organize data and results for the various constituents involved in managing facilities.

Operations teams need to see equipment and performance data and have analytic results clearly organized by region, site, type of facility and other attributes.

And portfolio managers need to look at performance from a higher level with presentations that show answer questions like what types of issues am I having in my facilities? Where do they occur? How long do they last? How often do they occur? AND What are they costing me?

SkySpark’s built-in Apps provide the visualizations and reports needed to serve the needs of the different teams involved in facility and energy management across widely dispersed portfolios.

And today, SkySpark is deployed across thousands of sites for many of the most well-known names in multi-site retail and quick-serve restaurants.

SkySpark® is an extensible, end-to-end software platform for smart device data that can be applied from the edge to the cloud. SkySpark provides data collection, data storage, data management, automated analytics, and data visualization for the Internet of Things applications in the built environment and is designed to be used as a platform for OEMs to build their additional value on.

If you are planning to offer your customers solutions to collect, manage and create value from the data produced by smart, connected devices you will invariably encounter the need to buy or build software to address the following needs:

SkySpark provides all of these functions in a ready-to-go platform that has been proven across thousands of applications.

If you are working with IoT devices and their data, you likely know that machine data is different than conventional IT data. SkySpark has been designed from the ground up for the unique needs of sensors, machine, and device data.

Device data is by nature “time-series” data – a sensor value with a corresponding timestamp. High-resolution device data can yield an immense volume of timestamp/value pairs. For example, if we store minutely data for a single sensor (we call a sensor a “point”) we end up with 525,600 samples per year. 100,000 points with two years of minute data result in 105 billion samples! Although that isn’t actually an extremely large system for SkySpark, a traditional database with 100 billion rows would be considered a really big database. In order to provide high-speed processing of data and a responsive user interface for viewing and analyzing data, efficient storage, and processing of these volumes of data is a top priority for any IoT software platform and an area where SkySpark excels:

SkySpark gives you the flexibility to deploy solutions that fit your customer’s needs and your business model – whether that is Software as a Service, on-premise deployment, or embedded products.