Splunk integrates with McKenney's, eyes building sensor data
Splunk on Wednesday said that McKenney's, a building automation and security company, will use the company's software as the backbone for its analytics package that gauges the health of elevators, security doors, switches and physical assets.
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Specifically, Splunk Enterprise will be integrated with McKenney's bdoc Business Intelligence for Buildings software. McKenney is a reseller of Splunk, which will garner more licenses.
McKenney's launched bdoc to gather facilities data and then manage assets and maintain them. Brian Gilmore, program manager for the Enterprise Intelligence Group within the McKenney’s Automation & Control Solutions (ACS) division, said his company has been working on a project for about a year at a U.S. Air Force base. The project takes data from tens of thousands of buildings and their sensors and processes them. The overall goal is to save $2.5 million a year with a three-year payback.
"Bdoc is part of a much larger energy savings project," said Gilmore, who noted energy savings was the primary return on investment metric. "We can quantify that energy bills are diminishing."
The project at the Eglin Air Force base requires bdoc to take in machine data from 20,000 sensors deployed in 100 buildings. Splunk's analysis tools help correlate anomalies with things like energy utilization.
In the long run, Gilmore said the Air Force base project will highlight operational gains and things such as decreased wear and tear on equipment, lower failure rates and a decrease in major building issues. "We're setting an example at the base and saying that building managers can use the same business intelligence tools corporations use to apply data."
The McKenney's/Splunk partnership highlights how the Internet of things and machine-to-machine data is starting to ramp. Big vendors such as IBM are already targeting the space.
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