Open Design goes public with BIMstorm LAX

buildingSmart is proving to be more evangelical than its predecessors NBIMS and IFC. This is an indication that the participants feel that the slow committee work is done, the concepts have been proved, and it is time to change the way buildings are designed, built, and operated.

To accomplish the change to information sharing and stewardship across the full lifetime of a building, many people in many industries will need to change their business practices simultaneously. buildingSmart is an effort to transform the way buildings are designed, built and operated based on the principles of BIM. To accomplish this, many people in many related businesses will need to transform how they work together. ONUMA is engaging the harder work of social change flat on in BIMstorm.

As I understand it, the first BIMstorm will be the public competitive design of 30 blocks of Los Angeles beginning January 31.

It looks like there first major evangelical effort will be the public competitive design of 30 blocks of Los Angeles beginning on January 31…Owners and developers can still request that their project site to be included in the BIMstorm even if it is not in the identified area.

BIMstorm will be a cross disciplinary effort (well, it would have to be!) with standards-based exchange of information. Teams include:

• Assessors
• Appraisers
• Architects
• Brokers
• Building Inspectors
• Building Product Suppliers
• City Agencies
• Developers
• Emergency Responders
• Engineers
• Facility Managers
• Landlords
• Lenders
• Other city and state agencies (domestic and international)
• Owners of Existing Properties
• Planners
• Tenants

At the start of the BIMstorm™ selected teams will be assigned a specific site. Each site will have a recommended program based on actual project requests. Judging will take place at the end of the BIMstorm™ and awards will be given for various categories. The intent is to demonstrate real-tiime collaboration, rapid design and simulation of projects.

Some of you might want to sign in to watch the melee…

http://BIMstorm.com/LAX .

Sun and Clouds

Earlier this week, I suggested that one outcome of the Software as a Service (SaaS) approach will be that complex operations such as BIM servers would migrate into cloud computing, where there data can be shared and updated by Designers, Architects, Engineers, and used by Owner/Operators.

This week, Sun (the computer company that long used the motto “the network is the computer”) announced that by 2015 Sun will have *no* data centers. All internal IT for this technology company will be acquired under the SaaS model. "We will need to get to a point in which we mandate detailed SLAs and manage/monitor those SLAs," Cinque writes. "As long as a SaaS provider can adhere to our detailed SLAs, then it shouldn't matter where the applications sit. The challenge is getting those detailed SLAs written out, (and) having the SaaS industry evolve where they can accept client-driven SLA's." By 2013, 5 years from now, Sun expects to eliminate half of their square footage in data centers

So what does this say about buildings and energy?

First, it both intensifies the reasons behind The Green Grid (see my earlier comments here) while reducing the number of people interested. While CABA may call Networking the 4^th utility, data processing may instead become the 4^th utility. The differences in cost, and the intensity of the operations load may make data centers an unjustifiable expense.

Rapidly rising energy costs may be the catalyst; virtualization and the associated capability of outsourced customization to produce tailor-fit solutions are the enabler. The increasing demands of security and enhanced benefits of service specialization will be long term drivers. Those data centers that remain will demand highly efficient interactive means to manage transforming energy to raw business process.

Next, it invalidates the traditional building system model of on-site monitoring. Traditional building systems bring too much data and too little information to too few people. Cloud computing will decrease the barriers to fewer people with greater expertise monitoring more building systems. Communications models for embedded building systems that do not match the new reality will suffer competitive disadvantage.

Low level protocols will remain much as they are; gateways that abstract underlying system up to actionable alarms and descriptive information. These gateways will use enterprise-style protocols that perform well over the internet.

Such gateways are exactly what we need to enable new business service. Remote analytics. Knowledge based maintenance management. Live energy modeling. Third party interactive demand/response. Each of these services, and others we do not yet know, will also become services, and move into the clouds.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/10/suns_goal_no_in-house_data_centers_by_2015.html