relayr is excited to be the first software partner in Cisco’s newly announced Digital Ceiling Ecosystem. With the digital revolution and widespread migration to network-powered smart LED systems occurring in today’s lighting industry, Cisco and forward-thinking partners like relayr recognize the significant opportunity this creates for our customers.
As LED systems become the lighting standard in offices and other buildings, previously unsolvable business challenges now have almost limitless possibilities for solutions.
What is the Digital Ceiling?
The next technology revolution is happening right above our heads. The LED lighting systems being implemented today are built with the digital future in mind. New, even more energy efficient LEDs can now be powered by the network through Power over Ethernet (PoE), and they come natively equipped with sensors. Each luminaire is now a valuable IP end point, capable of collecting and communicating data from the ceiling directly to your network.
Like Voice over IP (VoIP) and Networked Video (Video over IP) that came before, the evolution of lighting to Power over Ethernet (PoE)-powered LED lighting systems has opened a world of possibilities.
The Cisco Digital Ceiling ecosystem recognizes these possibilities for solving our customers’ real business challenges. The Cisco Digital Ceiling enables the convergence of currently siloed building networks—lighting, heating and cooling, IP video, IoT sensors, and much more—through a secure and intelligent network platform.
The Past
In the Buildings space, connecting to the data in various systems has always been difficult and complicated; controlling those systems was even harder. The number of proprietary gateways, layers of complicated technology, and disparate programming languages has made it impossible to effectively collect and analyze data or control the various systems in the building without monstrous, bloated building automation applications.
This is all changing!
The Future
The future of buildings is already here. As we mentioned, through these new network-powered smart lighting systems, every luminaire is now an IP end point, just like every laptop or phone is today. This means that there is rich data to be mined from these endpoints, and that data is easier to interact with. By converging it with the network, all of the systems are speaking the same language: TCP/IP.
Real Business Solutions to Real Business Problems
The Digital Ceiling ecosystem brings together experts across a number of domains. Beginning with lighting and embedded sensors, it is poised to deliver real solutions to business challenges. There will be a wealth of data generated by these technologies, and that data will help our customers address things like understanding how and when a building is being utilized, traffic patterns within the buildings, and only providing heating and cooling to occupied portions of a building.
As the Digital Ceiling ecosystem grows, we’ll be demonstrating real world solutions developed with other partners.
relayr’s Role in the Digital Ceiling ecosystem
Tony Shakib, Cisco’s VP of IoT Solutions says this of relayr’s role in the Digital Ceiling partner ecosystem. “The Digital Ceiling brings IoT to enterprises worldwide. With relayr as part of the global partner ecosystem, our customers will benefit from increased building intelligence of building systems connected via an IP network. This new level of building intelligence is very important for our mutual customers.”
The Digital Ceiling brings together many different building systems. relayr is an enabler layer that helps businesses extract business value from the data collected via connected devices and systems. We provide a way to analyze it, and deliver the right data in the right way to the right people and services. relayr’s protocol agnostic platform provides the ability for our customers and partners to retrieve data and make it meaningful.
