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This Wipro Ltd. white paper highlights the fact that similar to smart cities, the concept of smart buildings is rapidly emerging. Within this context, a variety of ICT based technologies must successfully interact to transform already existing buildings into smart buildings. Moreover, this report focuses mainly on the Gulf region and the problems faced by city planners there.
Dubai and Abu Dhabi have the most mature and ambitious plans regarding the creation and development of the smart city and smart building context. Both of these areas are exposed to a sharp increase of urban population rate and local and federal governments try to meet goals related to carbon emissions and citizen’ s expectations.
One of the key findings of this report refers to the fact that governments should encourage collaboration between stakeholders in order to drive engagement levels. Moreover, it is pointed out that governments, private and public building owners, and technology vendors share common objectives for driving facility cost reductions, operational efficiencies, and sustainability improvements.
Smart Building solutions give building owners, operators, and other key decision-makers unprecedented visibility into equipment operations and building use courtesy of the real-time data generated by the sensors, monitors, and controls in a Smart Building solution configuration.
The aim of developing an ecosystem around Smart Buildings is to bring diverse stakeholders together to develop common goals and language and to discuss how creating new processes, policies, and financing mechanisms for new technology adoption can benefit the whole community. Simply put, an innovation ecosystem brings multiple viewpoints to the table with the goal of creating ‘win-win’ solutions.
Some leading examples of leading Smart Buildings in the Gulf area are the Private Equity Bank in Bahrain, the Ministry of Higher Education in Riyadh and The Saudi Sinnovate Smart Technology Hub in Jeddah. Some of the main challenges arising from the Smart Building concept refer to the readiness of the ecosystem, the significant capex investment, the cost of connectivity or bandwidth, the stakeholders’ motivation etc.
Read the full white paper here.