IT professionals may be surprised at how quickly buildings are changing and, more importantly, at how much computing power is deployed in buildings. The state of IT in buildings today is outlined here, emphasizing the hospitality market. Intelligent building concepts have seen a revitalization recently because of the proliferation of IT and Internet services. Many of these developments have begun to elevate average structures to intelligent buildings.

High-level system technology isn’t in every facility yet, but there’s a growing number of intelligent buildings in the mainstream.

One indication of this trend is the widespread use of the same terms when referring to IT and building technology. Convergence is used to describe how building systems are blending with IT and the Internet. IT people use convergence to refer to blending of data and functionality from several software applications. Terms like standard, E- business, and real-time are used the same way for buildings and IT. Grid is a common term, but IT people are talking about grid computing while buildings people mean the national electric system. Other terms like integration, collaboration, optimize, Internet-ready (or enabled), and intelligent have varied meanings and cause confusion in both worlds. Nonetheless, both industries are using the same language.

Intelligent buildings truly embody IIT, and there is an award designed to highlight such buildings. “Buildy Awards” are given annually at the Builconn Forum (www.builconn.com), recognizing building owners and system integrators who create integrated and interoperable systems. A hotel has not won a Buildy yet, but those discussed here would be good candidates.

Beyond building comfort, security, and fundamental requirements, consider how IT can be integrated into customer service. The emphasis is on hotels, but this technology can apply to all building types. Hotels are interesting because they are starting to explore hospitality of the future. Nick Price, director of technology and CTO for Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group, one of the few hotels to use IP networks for all in-room systems, said, “Hotels have become famous for implementing yesterday’s technology today, just as the consumer traded today’s technology for tomorrow’s. No place is this more evident than in the guest room where, for example, even many middle-income consumers now have, at home, high-definition televisions with 400 channels, quality on-demand programming, digital video recorders, searchable program guides, and high-end sound systems. But you can’t find many of these things even in high-end hotel rooms.”

Mandarin Oriental and many other hotel companies are working to move the hospitality industry forward by joining Hotel Technology – Next Generation (HTNG), a “nonprofit organization with global scope, formed in 2002 to facilitate the development of next-generation, customer-centric technologies to better meet the needs of the global hotel community.” Price’s views and much more relevant information on future hotel technology can be found on the group’s website at www.htng.org.

HTNG is visionary in its view of future hotels that will create a new level of customer service. The vision is guests who are recognized and called by name on arrival with a room ready that meets their expectations. Hotels should create a guest profile so that mini-bars would be stocked with preferred brands of drinks and snacks, and the room conditioned to the guest’s desired temperature. Readers may have had the experience of calling a hotel front desk from the room and having staff call them by name. Such personal service is very powerful, but HTNG has more in mind.

HTNG has enlisted some of the best minds from some of the best companies to define the future of hospitality. Price cited an example of implementing yesterday’s technology, noting that many hotels have recently installed compact disc players, just as consumers have moved en masse to carrying their own music and other entertainment on MP3 players, iPods, portable media centers, tablet PCs, and laptop computers. “They can plug these in to their audio systems at home or in their car, and that is how they listen to music. How can we call a hotel room a ‘home away from home,’ when we not only fail to give guests the variety of entertainment that they want, but we can’t even support what they already carry with them?” Price said.

Ken Martinez, hospitality market business manager with Paradyne Corporation, is also an HTNG member. Martinez said, “The evolution of IP-based networks has created new opportunities to deliver technology-based services to guest rooms over a single set of wires. In the past, you needed two or even three sets of wires — coaxial cable, twisted-pair, and often Category 5 cable — to deliver entertainment, telephone service, and wired or wireless high-speed networks. Today, all of the traditional services — and many new ones — can be delivered over a single network.”

HTNG is working on new technology applications for hotels, or IIT for hospitality. HTNG’s goal is “customer-centric systems” for hotels globally. HTNG executive director Douglas Rice told the Builconn audience that the challenge is that there are over 100 categories of systems commonly used in hotels that spend $25 million per year on IT.

Hotels must provide services that everyone wants, like high-speed Internet, hotel-wide and in rooms. Going beyond these services and blending them with personal attention is next generation hotel intelligence. “Most of the major hotel companies are reevaluating the entire networking strategy for guest rooms — and even how they will build and operate new hotels — in anticipation of the move to all-IP-based in-room technology, including telephony, video-on-demand, and wireless services, in addition to traditional high-speed Internet service,” Rice said.

At Builconn, Rice shared some exciting insights on the integration of hotel systems with the business process. Hospitality focuses on achieving consistent quality of guest experience, but the goal is to make it both consistent and personal for each guest. Some hotels are experimenting with VIP guest programs including mailing an RFID-labeled confirmation and welcome card. When a guest arrives, the RFID label triggers a message to the front desk and bell stand, identifying guests so that they are greeted by name. The goal is to integrate room temperature for comfort with guest check in, and to monitor guest arrival and departure so cleaning and service is done while guests are out of the room.

Another concept is multi-modal wake up calls that integrate several technologies: a phone call, turning on the TV to guests’ preferred station, opening drapes, and making coffee. Developments in voice-over-IP (VOIP) telephony have also created new capabilities and guest expectations including personalized speed dial, call forwarding, follow-me, multi-line ringing, multi-party conferencing, plus using the phone handset as a text messaging device. The challenge is integrating the hotel’s telephony infrastructure in two ways: with hotel services, to enable the guest and staff to interact in a richer and more personalized way; and with the various devices guests bring with them — mobile phones, PDAs, notebook computers, etc. The hotels discussed here have leveraged intelligent building functions and are on the way to next-generation hospitality.

Exploiting building intelligence to achieve a competitive advantage and build customer loyalty is not unique to hotels. Glen Allendinger of Harbor Research sees buildings as “pervasive microcosms” for implementation of smart building Internet-enabled devices offering a wide range of functionality. He believes “the buildings space is a test-bed for machine to machine (M2M) and pervasive systems — a vast ‘staging area’ for what’s to come in the M2M space overall.”

M2M refers to Harbor’s pervasive Internet projections of trillions of new Internet users over the next five years, and that it’s possible for these devices to employ collaborative processing. In that light, smart devices in buildings are a microcosm of the M2M business, yet IIT goes beyond simply installing these devices in intelligent buildings. IIT is exciting because collaborative processing can leverage the power and information in these devices to improve building performance and enhance the business process. Figure 1 shows some of the systems found in intelligent buildings that can be leveraged to achieve these goals.

Based on concepts presented by HTNG and Harbor Research, intelligent buildings are clearly not just about building functions. There are a dramatic number of companies in this space working on and developing technology offerings, and not just manufacturers but also integrators and software companies because this technology is accessible to large and small companies. HTNG is counting on suppliers to develop robust and intelligent hospitality solutions, but a wide range of building types will benefit from this technology. Markets in larger commercial buildings, shopping malls, and campus environments can improve the ROI, and help justify technology development cost and link heterogeneous systems. There is industry consensus that business process improvement and lower technology cost will drive the market for smart devices, Internet services, and automation systems in smaller buildings.