Let's take a look back at 2022
It has been a difficult year for many businesses, especially retail stores on the high street; however, the technology sector seems to be booming with mergers and acquisitions, including Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover.
It has, of course, been a mixed year with highs, including the World Cup, The Lionesses bringing it home, and the communal celebration of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. However, lows also include the cost-of-living crisis, the continuing war in Ukraine, strikes across many service industries and record temperatures in many areas of the world caused by global warming.
We live in strange and volatile times; it is difficult to predict what 2023 has in store, but themes linked to sustainability, strong purpose and wellbeing remain prevalent.
We have compiled some of our personal highs from 2022 within amBX and the wider smart building industry. The small wins must be celebrated and acknowledged to keep spirits high as the year draws to an end.
Partnerships
We have witnessed a multitude of new partnerships in the industry throughout 2022. It is now a common strategy to partner and utilise quality solutions that have already been developed rather than working independently with a rival mindset and spending vast amounts of time and money developing similar products in-house.
This collaborative approach has been a long time coming as the industry moved to open standards to facilitate unification and interoperability in buildings. There are still some bumps in the road, with true seamless connectivity lacking in many buildings, but the rise of the System Integration role bridges the gap and aims to make this concept a reality.
At amBX, we have had a busy year working with a range of partners and have many more to be announced in 2023.
ELP is a specialist emergency lighting manufacturer. We have recently completed a UK-wide project together, vastly improving the safety of residents through automated control software. We can’t wait to tell you more about this project in 2023.
Prysmian Group is the global leader in the energy and telecom cables and systems industry. With 140 years’ experience, sales of over €12 billion, almost 29,000 employees in over 50 countries and 108 plants, the Group is strongly positioned in high-tech markets and offers the widest possible range of products, services, technologies and expertise to its global client base. Now offering PoE technology, they required an integration solution and software platform to connect their PoE emergency lighting and also to provide control and insights via a user interface. We were able to provide the graphical interface and the integration for them with our protocol-agnostic software solution allowing them to sell an end-to-end solution to their customers. We look forward to developing our partnership further throughout 2023, and we can’t wait to share more details with you about the work we are doing.
We also partnered with Circadacare who work within the healthcare industry, providing circadian supportive lighting for residents in care homes. This technology helps to regulate their sleep patterns, improve their mood and engagement levels providing them with a better quality of life.
Circadacare licences our circadian lighting software to deliver a full end-to-end solution for care homes. This is a great initiative with a brilliant purpose, and we are excited to be part of such a positive solution. We live in an ageing population, and approx 676,000 people in the UK live with dementia; therefore, this kind of technology can make a real life-enhancing difference. We’re looking forward to sharing research, case studies and insights with you throughout next year.
Another one of our new partners is Demark-based IoT Simplified; they are a commissioning engineering company that integrates ventilation, lighting, access control, meeting booking and several other systems under one single solution.
The Danish installer was seeking a flexible, open-architecture platform that would allow them to simply link multiple systems, aggregate data and converge it all into a single source. This required a system, such as ours, that can communicate with multiple protocols simultaneously. IoT Simplified work with us on a continuous basis, licencing integration software for a variety of projects in many different industries.
This year, we were also asked to be part of the Smart Building Bootcamp and the UK Green Building Council (GBC) Solutions Library. We’re proud to collaborate with these leading industry bodies to continue to educate and showcase innovative solutions.
You can check out our Director of Product in the Smart Building Bootcamp here. The courses are very informative, and we would highly recommend anyone new to the industry to complete them to gain a solid foundation of knowledge.
The UK GBC also do an amazing job of showcasing solutions that meet the needs for a sustainable future. We are honoured to be part of their library alongside other worthy solutions. You can check out our entry here.
Industry Events
The return of in-person events! 2022 has been the year of events, many have made a return for the first time since the pandemic, and we attended our fair share of them. Below are some of our key takeaways from those events.
🔹Integration software is essential
🔹Partnerships are the way forward
🔹Data normalisation is key
🔹Removing data silos will improve building sustainability
🔹Lighting integration is still an issue for the market
🔹Circular economy principles are growing in popularity
🔹KNX is still being used
🔹PoE is still present
🔹Vertical farming could be the next big opportunity for lighting
🔹Less of the traditional companies exhibited in 2022
🔹Artificial Intelligence and robotics could improve efficiency, reducing manual tasks
🔹There’s a need for common greenhouse ontology to allow data across an indoor farm to be aggregated and sent to a central source
🔹Local for local - Crops need to be able to grow from anywhere in the world to reduce transport emissions
🔹Consistency in the growing chamber is essential
🔹Plant-based diets support the move to a more sustainable world
amBX - The Smart Building Podcast Highlights
We recently shared our podcast highlights on LinkedIn; it has been a great year building our network and continuing conversations with industry stakeholders. Below are some of our highlights; you can check out all of our episodes here.
We created 75% more content than other podcasts in the Business category
Our followers grew by 166%
We had 172% more streams
We’re a top 10 podcast for 47 fans within our niche
Top episodes include:
The Benefits of Lighting Integration with Smart Building Platforms - amBX
Digital Twins in Smart Buildings and Cities - Dogu Taskiran, Smart City Thought-leader
The Role of Smart Lighting in Commercial Buildings - Roger Woodward, Smart Building Consultant
In Summary
The industry still has a long way to go, every year, we predict big changes regarding net zero and the adoption of new innovations, but the appetite for change is slower than we would like. Education is needed, and legislation needs to make change happen quicker.
However, it is important not to dwell on negatives, and there have been many positives for amBX this year; we expect more of the same in 2023 with an acceleration of partnerships and project collaborations to deliver best-in-class smart building solutions that deliver healthy building for the environment and for occupants.