We spent last Thursday listening to talks from various players in the building automation industry. In a nutshell, the following items stood out:

• Opensource gravitational pull continues. Smaller companies are tackling established players by touting their openness and their embrace of open standards (and simplified license structure). This applies to protocols (MQTT, Haystack), software (Node-RED, Grafana) and even hardware (Raspberry Pi: not quite open-source but close enough). The company Revolution Pi is a strong case study for this topic
  
  
• There's growing opportunity for AI. Currently, software and data are siloed according to different vendor solutions, which creates barriers to deploying consistent AI at scale and the industry lags in what it could achieve with improved algorithms with holistic data sources. However the opportunity is growing as we consider 2 trends: (i) data is freed from silos and can be consolidated into ML pipelines for training and deployment, and (ii) protocols to trigger actions are becoming more standardized and therefore easier to implement
  
  
• Success takes a blend of innovation and pragmatism. We were very interested to see what Lumenradio is doing to remove cables (and had an engaging discussion around radio frequencies and alternatives such as Lora), as well as the refreshingly pragmatic approach demonstrated by company Fidelix also within large-scale projects
  
  

We're looking forward to pushing some use-cases of our own in this space over the coming months. It's an exciting space to be working in. Many thanks again to Alvasys for hosting this fun event.