The Intersection of IoT and ESG: Veea Unveils ESG as a Service for Sustainable Commercial Buildings
Wednesday, February 22, 2023
Source | Industrial IoT News
Around the world, investors and consumers are increasingly putting an emphasis on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues when making decisions. The continuous parallels being drawn between the unforeseen risks of a pandemic and the climate crisis, with both impacting the global economy substantially, has made many investors and policymakers realize a greater need to accelerate investments and progress on businesses that prioritize ESG issues.
This has in turn, led to the enhanced focus on ESG standing among organizations of all sizes in all industries, with more businesses being introduced to the multi-faceted and all-permeable benefits of ESG, such as attracting talent, targeting future consumers, facilitating brand-enhancement and innovation. However, improving ESG standing is easier said than done, especially for industries that have historically been slow to change, the most notable being the industrial sector.
Socially, factory floors can be home to several pollutants, such as dusts, fogs, smokes, mists, gasses, and vapors that are potentially harmful to employees working near machinery. Environmentally, things are even worse, as manufacturing accounts for almost one-fifth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Luckily for industrial organizations, amidst the digital revolution, new technologies can help manufacturers improve their ESG standing through the creation of smart factories.
Through the use of devices and applications like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and the internet of things (IoT), industrial enterprises can obtain increased yields, improved quality, and improved visibility for predictive maintenance. In relation to ESG, smart factories can provide optimized resource consumption, for enhanced use of water and energy. The technology can also offer optimized airflow and air quality, creating a healthier, safer work environment for employees on factory floors.
The global smart manufacturing market was valued at $254.24 billion in 2022 and is anticipated to grow at a CAGR of 14.9 percent from 2023 to 2030. However, as more industrial organizations begin to look for technology that can improve their ESG standing, this number may certainly be set to rise in the near future.
Recently, Veea Inc., a provider of integrated smart edge connectivity, communications and computing for edge and cloud, formally announced the availability of its new Environmental, Societal and Governance as a Service (ESGaaS) offering. The offering consists of an array of solutions, powered by the Veea Edge Platform, which integrates connectivity and edge computing solutions via an open, scalable, and secure platform at the device edge.
The growing market for Environmental, Societal and Governance (ESG) solutions brings brand new opportunities for solution providers. Commercial real estate solutions providers and property managers today are utilizing technology to create smarter buildings, helping to achieve energy and cost efficiencies, real-time monitoring, and control, improved in-building experiences, in order to meet ESG requirements and building compliance.
“Until now, implementing such a system was complex and costly due to several challenges related to data gathering and processing,” said Allen Salmasi, CEO, Veea. “The Veea Edge Platform is designed to effectively address these challenges, aiding companies in gathering building data to drive informed operational decisions. By creating a unified, simplified and secure local network, and making it easy to onboard devices of all types is critical in enterprise and commercial real estate, with benefits that include creating excellent experiences, while lowering cost, and instantly improving ESG scores.”
The ESGaaS offering provides Veea’s proprietary vBus technology, which enables integration with numerous IoT sensors and equipment, shortening development effort and deployment time. Supported protocols include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee, and LoRaWAN.
Through collection of building management systems (BMS) sensor data at the edge using VeeaHubs, not only can the processing of data and decision making be expedited, but data security also improves significantly. A smart Building Management System can provide benefits including seamless integration with Building Management Systems (BMS), reduction of TCO, energy savings, and improved building and tenant and guest comfort and safety.
On top of this, Veea’s vTBA and SD-WAN solutions provide a secure, remotely monitored and controlled connection between the device edge and your cloud services.
Along with tackling some of the most prominent smart building challenges, Veaa’s ESGaaS offering also provides a variety of advantages related to ESG standards across an array of business processes, including:
- Energy: efficiency and consumption
- Gases and air quality: pollutants and air particle levels
- Access and security: camera feeds, lock status, keypad inputs for improved building security and tenant safety
- Lighting: ambient light levels, light levels by room or perimeter
- Water: leak detection and remediation
- Connectivity: Operations, tenant, and guest connectivity
- Building communications: digital signage, notifications, and alarms
- Maintenance: reduced unscheduled downtime through predictive maintenance
- High-speed network access via Wi-Fi, 4G and 5G
- Sustainability
Veea’s partners have already taken this platform to the next level, integrating analytics, dashboards, and reporting to create market-leading solutions. These solutions enable direct, secure, and scalable control of building environments, reducing energy consumption and expense, reducing carbon footprint, supporting LEED certification, ensuring a healthy environment, and supporting tangible ESG programs.
For example, the Niagara Framework is now available on the Veea Edge Platform. Tridium’s Niagara open building management framework is one of the world’s most widely-used building management software, revolutionizing the way buildings are managed. With the Veea Edge Platform, users can leverage the Niagara Framework’s features in new ways to monitor and manage their buildings, ensuring their occupants’ safety, comfort, and convenience and introduce new wireless end-points utilizing the Veea Edge Platform’s vMesh technology.
With WYND Technologies, an air quality management and analytics company, the Veea Edge Platform provides the local edge mesh network, which collects the data from the WYND Halo indoor air quality monitors, and performs the local processing for interpreting, managing, reporting, and presenting the information collected with a wireless 4G WAN uplink to the cloud for remote reporting, alerts, notifications and archiving.
The data generated and stored locally on the Veea Edge Platform can be used by enterprises to efficiently monitor and analyze components such as pollutants, odors, humidity, moisture, temperature, maintenance of systems, and even occupancy.
The Veea team will be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 27 – March 2, available for briefings and interviews. Please contact Tom Williams to set up a meeting to learn more, and to schedule time with one of Veea’s experts.