“It is rewarding to collaborate with Intel because like-minded people are excited about working towards a common goal and always creating new ideas. Across the board, Intel is a brand everyone knows and trusts. No matter what size the business, it reassures people – especially in the SMBs we work on.”

Jean-Charles Matamoros,Chief Executive Officer,AVOB

Solution brief

Intel® Atom™ ProcessorInternet of Things

Small and smart: saving energy with AVOB building management

It’s not easy being greenOffices, warehouses, and other workplace buildings use a lot of energy, with some sources citing average commercial consumption at 350 kWh/m²/year. There is pressure from international bodies that regularly publish energy data, such as the International Energy Agency and the European Environment Agency, to cut world energy consumption.

Many countries are legislating to work against rising energy consumption and emissions as the global situation worsens. A groundbreaking French decree, of January 2013, highlights this urgency: “increases in energy costs, market deregulation, and compliance with new regulations [means that] companies need to regain control over their energy costs as soon as possible.” This requires nightly power-off of commercial lighting and signage in France to help save energy. Indeed, buildings represent 40 percent of the consumption of final energy in industrialized countries and, with the amount of energy that is wasted, this equates to significant financial losses. Thus, from both a compliance and a cost-saving perspective, saving energy is an urgent item on every business agenda, from sole traders to enterprises.

Small and medium-sized buildings (SMB), such as bank branches, retail

outlets, office buildings, warehouses, and schools, represent the lion’s share of commercial structures: 98 percent of buildings in the western world are SMB, defined as buildings with less than 10,000m2 of floorspace. Almost none of these buildings are monitored or managed, which indicates a significant potential waste in resources. “A building is like a PC, you can manage it, switch it on and off, and measure how much energy and other resources it is using up,” comments Jean-Charles Matamoros, chief executive officer, AVOB. “In the past, many businesses – especially smaller ones – have been left to face their energy problems alone as, traditionally, building management systems are too expensive, complex, or simply inadequate. We are looking to change this with our latest solution.”

Having built its business providing IT networking, AVOB recognized the potential in simple and easy-to-install smart energy management and started building solutions specifically to help building and facilities managers save energy by better monitoring and controlling their environments.

Saving energy for SMBEstablished in 2009, AVOB is now a French leader in IT power management, having recently entered the world

Saving energy with AVOB building management 2

of smart, connected buildings. It designs software solutions that allow organizations to significantly reduce their carbon footprint and energy consumption. Indeed, AVOB can control most of the energy consumption in commercial sites and has saved 100 million KWh of energy across its customers.

AVOB aims to simplify building energy management so building and facility managers can monitor and control it end-to-end, only pulling on the IT department for network access. AVOB’s Internet of Things (IoT) gateway requires minimal skills and resources to set up, but still ensures optimum performance and security. To get its IoT offering off the ground, AVOB needed credibility, and a trusted advisor. “The marketplace has confidence in the Intel brand, Intel® technology, and particularly Intel® AtomTM processors,” said Matamoros. “We have felt the benefit of having this association, and have drawn strength to delve into the world of the IoT thanks to Intel’s support.”

AVOB has been working with Intel since 2009 and has built an innovative offering for SMB based on Intel technology, which helps create a more intelligently managed building environment. Using smart sensors, building environments and resources from lighting to heating and cooling can be automatically monitored and controlled by AVOB technology, enabling impressive potential energy savings. This smart building management solution, the Energy Saver for SMB*, is powered by Intel Atom processors and allows users to monitor and organize buildings in a centralized and secure way.

“IoT solutions have been used to solve various challenges in facilities management and operations, but not as much in SMB,” said Matamoros. “We want to enable companies to

make the most of building data and help to transform client operations. With our building monitoring and controls, building managers can achieve significant savings on building resources and cut their energy bills by up to 40 percent. Up to half of this can be achieved simply by monitoring energy consumption and changing behaviors, and the other 20 percent may be made possible through remote management.”1

Everyone benefitsAVOB’s Energy Saver for SMB is an all-in-one energy management system with two distinct options suitable for a range of business uses: monitoring and remote control. Saving energy is important for all parties, but each has its own motivators, and AVOB addresses each of these: tenants get lower bills and are assured of regulatory compliance; owners enhance their real estate’s value and get visibility and benchmarking of their whole building stock; operators get assisted, secure site control with the advantage of being able to consolidate their monitoring and manage their buildings from a single dashboard; financial stakeholders get clear budget forecasting based on usage and return on investment (ROI) expectations.

AVOB analysis and communication tools display energy savings, generate automated periodical reports, and calculate and secure ROI, making sharing energy efficiency initiatives with customers and decision makers clear and simple. Real-time energy alerts enable a responsive, competitive and quality maintenance service.

“With Energy Saver for SMB, our customers can arrange sub-billing by floor, area, or use, and define uses by different criteria such as business unit, floor, region, or building,” explained Matamoros. “Users can set universal building standby schedules, perhaps for temperature or lighting, and benefit

Figure 1: AVOB box

Saving energy with AVOB building management 3

from regional or national multi-site control. It also enables optimization of energy purchases from suppliers and ROI validation, which are useful for board-level understanding and buy-in.”

Building secure bridgesIntel Atom processors in the IoT gateway devices provide the computing power and throughput needed to gather all in-coming data, filter, normalize, and buffer it, then quickly and securely send it to AVOB’s cloud. Data from each IoT gate-way is processed and stored privately in the cloud for easy review and analysis through a simple and customizable AVOB* dashboard application on the client’s PC or mobile device. This allows clients to access and monitor their data, the impact of energy policies, and any financial savings from anywhere.

“Users can see the output of all the data collection through a web app, enabling them to keep up to date with all their building information using a single dashboard,” said Matamoros. “This is especially useful for whoever manages the building as they can either monitor or control the relevant business units,

floors or buildings depending on how the business is managed. AVOB offers options to view and organize administra-tion rights at every level, so colleagues of different seniority get different ac-cess, which reinforces data security.”

This solution enables connection of leg-acy industrial devices and other systems to the IoT and integrates technologies and protocols for networking, embed-ded control, and enterprise-grade se-curity, making it valuable for any secure, scalable IoT system. It collates data com-ing in from smart sensors and sends it to the cloud for secure review and analysis in real-time. The transmission of data is completely safe throughout, from the sensor to the management console. Pro-tection is enforced automatically, since authentication and encryption has been inbuilt at each layer. This means all data sent to and from the gateway device is protected on every level.

“In the world of IoT, security is critical,” said Matamoros. “Our main goal is that no-one can take control of the solution, the network, or the building. Secure architecture is key to this, and we feel safe given Intel’s heritage in this area.

Securing data as it moves from cloud to building level is also important. We use a different cloud provider in each region to ensure our customers are comfort-able and have maximum possible security.”

Plug, play, and performEnergy Saver for SMB is an easy-to-install, out of the box solution, for both new and retrofit installations. It is tailored to SMB as it is simple to deploy. AVOB controls are permanently connected to the cloud, so users can switch a light off in a sister office in California from the London office in just seconds.

It leads the way in terms of compatibility, as it has a wide range of protocols that make integration into an existing building particularly easy, thanks to a mix of wired and wireless technologies. With the protocols they support, AVOB can currently address over 500 different devices. For even easier installation, AVOB is standardizing on the best adapted technologies for SMB.

Figure 2: Monitoring and controlling energy efficiency from the building to the user via the cloud, with AVOB’s Energy Saver for SMB

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computer systems, components, software, operations and functions. Any change to any of those factors may cause the results to vary. You should consult other information and performance tests to assist you in fully evaluating your contemplated purchases, including the performance of that product when combined with other products. For more information go to www.intel.com/performance

*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

your system manufacturer or retailer or learn more at http://www.intel.com

Intel does not control or audit the design or implementation of third party benchmark data or Web sites referenced in this document. Intel encourages all of its customers to visit the referenced Web sites or others

Intel, the Intel logo, and Atom are trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and other countries.

© 2016, Intel Corporation

Find the solution that’s right for your organization. View success stories from your peers and check out the IT Center, Intel’s resource for the IT Industry.

For even easier installation, AVOB is standardizing on the best adapted technologies for SMB.

“Our solution solves multiple problems that can be more of a headache for managers of SMB,” said Matamoros. “For example, our automated reports adhere to the energy reporting parts

50000, 14000, and 26000, as well as corporate sustainability reporting initiatives such as the hotel carbon measurement initiative or the French law Grenelle II. We’re happy to help businesses adhere to what is now a world-wide expectation of green

managing a building in a smart manner are wide-ranging, from boosting energy savings to improving the employee environment and streamlining technical systems.”

Efficient building managementUntil recently, building management was something IT managers largely ignored. Many commercial buildings still have management network cabling alongside the IT network, which is

seamlessly into the existing network and sends data through the IT network to the cloud, which is more cost-

down departmental silos and save energy and resources.

“This involves a great deal of trust, and we do a lot of work to build those bridg-es. Our heritage in IT networking and experience selling to IT managers has

helped, but our solution also needed to be really simple, secure, and reliable. We are happy with the end product, but this is just the start – we will be adding

site control and, since it supports Win-dows 7* embedded technology, each user can quickly integrate it into their network and innovate from there. Intel technology delivers power, longevity,

time-consuming need for setting up an embedded system in a new language, which is especially valuable for the SMB market. “The fact that our clients can unbox our product and be up and run-ning without a complex changeover or software conversion is a huge advan-tage,” said Matamoros. “It’s a building block that our clients can integrate on top of rather than building from scratch. Other processor products with the same microarchitecture can easily

great software compatibility.”

The Intel platform brings together

It provides a powerful and futureproof platform, Windows compatibility, and easy integration into an IT environment. On the other side, it provides strong performance, responsiveness, and reliability. These deliver value to key decision makers like building and facil-ity managers, and so were important factors for AVOB.

“Since we have been selling to manag-ers responsible for building energy us-age rather than our traditional custom-

ers in the IT department, we have learnt

in this industry. For instance, build-ing management technologies need greater longevity than other types of IT; our clients expect solutions to last for

we went with is a hardened, fanless machine with no moving parts and full embedded product support, so we are comfortable with its durability. Built-in

and a high price to performance ratio made Intel the right choice for us. We were looking for a Windows-based ma-chine that gave the lowest possible cost to the end user, balanced with strong performance, and that is what we got.”

Lessons learned

Unsurprisingly, emerging and industrialized countries encounter

AVOB is working to support a range of these. Emerging countries often have issues with power regula-

because, if a region has an unreli-able grid, it is even more important to optimize. Managing buildings

and cuts overall consumption, so if it is widely adopted it could even limit power outages. With Intel’s help, AVOB is looking forward to bringing building management

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whether it be limited energy pro-duction in California or frequent power outages in South Africa.

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