Revolutionizing Smart Building Solutions: From Integration Challenges to AI-Driven Security

Steven Kenny (: 00:00

Welcome to today's episode of Security Tech Talk. We're thrilled to have Dan Drogman with us today.

software development back in: 2004

. So Smart Spaces, founded in: 2010

Dan (: 01:27

Likewise and great to see you again Steven. I'm pretty much sold on your intro as well, I like that. I think I'd like to buy something from Smart Spaces.

Steven Kenny (: 01:37

Excellent. Well, let's be honest, when I look back at the history of the organization and the business, you know, this is a very mature and well-established organization, but some sort of 15 plus years ago, no one was on this digital transformation journey, and smart buildings and smart environments were sort of, you know, the utopia of what people might have aspired to have, but no one really knew where to start that journey. So, you know, what inspired you to... to think, okay, this is where we're gonna play, this is the market we're going into. How did it all start?

Dan (: 02:10

Yeah, cool. So yeah, me and my brother started out as coders for hire in the real estate industry. And it was mostly in commercial property at that time. So hotels and offices and a little bit of industrial. And we're building software based on client requirements. But the clients always look to us to give them insights into what they could do to push their businesses forward and further improve their service.

And this led to us to be one of the companies that got the first iBeacon project. If anyone remembers iBeacon, it was an Apple technology that let you identify where people were inside buildings or when they passed a building. Probably that was our first foray into physical smart, where we're interacting with the physical environment rather than just being purely digital. Up until that point, we were solely focused on the booking systems.

So bookings, payments, find an office, find a virtual office, find a meeting room, and the budgetary side of that as well. But yeah, iBeacon was the first time we really engaged with the physical side of the buildings. And the clients were blown away. We were able to load someone's booking when they entered a building. And they just felt that was so convenient. You're not fumbling around, looking through loads of emails, looking for the email booking, which always is a bit of an awkward start of a interaction with the reception team.

And we were like, wow, this has worked exceptionally well. It wasn't perfect, but it certainly worked. And we thought, well, what's next? And we're quite lucky that then the smartphone was starting to be heavily adopted. It reached like at the point where even my gran had a smartphone.

And that actually thought, well, now we should really start migrating to having an app, not just the web-based booking system we had previously. And as soon as we put that into the hands of the user, we started to think, well, we need to get access to the building. So the physical access was the next piece we integrated with the platform. And then we wanted controls of your climate and obviously, smart homes had started to mature slightly quicker than the commercial space in terms of user control.

And so we added the climate control, the lighting control. And I think it really took until, sorry to mention it on the podcast, but COVID or the pandemic for people to say, hang on, when they're coming back to the office, I've been in control of my climate, I've been in control of my lighting, I've been in control of my space.

I want that in the office. And so that really led to a huge demand for the application we've built. But, you know, if you look at the analytics today, the key usage is access control, visitor management, desk booking, meeting room booking, find a colleague, wayfinding, food ordering. It's the things that are where the user interacts with the real estate and the offer within the building.

Steven Kenny (: 05:01

So if we look at...at your sort of the offering and we look at smart spaces and we look at the smart buildings and we look at sort of the customer experience. How is the user experience determined? Because I'm looking at sort of mapping this out. We've got 10 different potential technology companies all trying to work independently of each other, yet you're trying to bring them all into one sort of graphical user interface that develops a unique cause and effect strategy that ultimately will benefit them in some way. Is that sort of the reality of where we are today?

Dan (: 05:36

Yeah, I think it has moved on slightly, but not as far as we'd like. And I think, yeah, in those early days, we were the ones going to every single manufacturer and saying, do you have an API? And what was quite funny actually in those early days, say around 2010, yeah, they would have an API, quite a rudimentary API, and no one had ever integrated with it. And we were the first to integrate with so many APIs. And we knew because the bugs that we found in these APIs meant the solution didn't work at all.

There was no way to get it to work. And so we forged relationships with the vendors for them to fix the bugs and get the API to work. And just based on the Q &A and the pain we went through and the journey we went through together, we realized we were the first to integrate. And actually, for a little while, I think we were like the first. But there wasn't many others. Now there's lots. So we were sort of paving and pioneering a lot of these integrations.

I think the payment solutions were the most mature because a lot of e-commerce companies had integrated so they had the best programs and they were the easiest to get up and running. But when you went to a lighting manufacturer, even dare I say a camera manufacturer, they sometimes were like API, you know, yeah, we need to get some data out here. And so it was interesting. So it's certainly getting easier because obviously now they are having a lot of demand, manufacturers have a lot of demand for people to integrate with APIs. But then sometimes you get let down in other areas, like the building network doesn't have sufficient security to publish that API to the cloud, or the systems sit on siloed networks where you can't have cause and effect between different systems. So there's certainly a long way to go, but it has improved in the time we've been doing it.

Steven Kenny (: 07:16

You obviously referenced video surveillance camera type technologies. I know from experience that having a fairly steady and robust API or provide some form of software development kit out to other organizations.

I'd go as far as saying it has been very, very clunky over the years. And I know firsthand that integrating and providing that interoperability between company A and company B can be an absolute nightmare and very costly as well. So, for your organization to deliver a solution to a customer, I guess you've got to try and manage expectations and say, actually, you've got a real estate of X number of sites of all of these different technologies. If you want to bring them all into a single platform, I need commitments from your existing vendors that they'll deliver X Y & Z.

How have you found having those conversations with technology companies that have traditionally been quite closed because they will see commercial conflict and they'll go, “I'm not going to open up my technology for someone else to integrate with it because that may compromise future sales moving forward.” Whereas you're focused on delivering the best solution for the customer every time. Are these difficult conversations based on the maturity of the market?

Dan (: 08:34

They were in the early days, they were say five years ago, it was painful and challenging. But where we got quite fortunate was a lot of the real estate projects we’re working on, the clients that we'd already deployed solutions to, which were reaping the benefits of those solutions and had our platform deployed over multiple buildings, they were building new developments. And what you've noticed with all manufacturers and integrators, that when there's a big ticket development project, the chances of them saying yes to win the job is far greater than when we're trying to do this retrospectively.

So, we sort of leverage that opportunity. So when we're at say Reba stage three in the UK, and we're sending out our specification, when we get the tender submissions back and we see the different solutions, we can see whether they've actually read our requirements in the first place, but how they've responded to those requirements. And then we'd have follow up calls.

And I think having that buying power, which is not our buying power, but the buying power of our clients behind us, we managed to open more doors. And once we established the success and smart buildings became into the era of a must have, not a nice to have, we then found that they were then posting on LinkedIn, “Oh we've integrated with smart spaces.” Because they wanted to join this industry and showcase how well their platforms integrate.

It's gone from, yeah, exactly like you said, risk, risk, risk, don't want to be responsible for this, don't want to let people in, don't want to let people integrate to, I want to win this big ticket job. Can we work with a company like Smart Spaces? Yes. Case study. Now they're telling everyone in the market they're the smartest company in their industry.

So it's been an interesting journey, but some haven't. They are the ones that have fallen by the wayside, which have said, we're a closed platform. There's no integration. They've not won the tender. They've noticed that their market shares decreased significantly. And now they're coming back into market with new products, but I think for a couple, it may be too late.

Steven Kenny (: 10:40

I think it is absolutely those that have clung on to their closed protocol systems. They are definitely the ones that are struggling today, especially when we consider that the whole industry is sort of navigating towards an IT sort of infrastructure. That those that are thinking, no, we're not going to play nicely with others, they're the ones that are struggling. I want to pick up on something that you referenced in terms of data.

Buildings now are driven by the data that they collect and that will provide some form of business intelligence. It will provide some form of automation. It will help lots of different subsystems. How are you finding that the likes of a video surveillance camera today has been provided for security measures? Yet, it is now seen as an important sensor that collects data. How do you try and sort of navigate and take this information from the camera and use it in lots of different types of applications that add additional value beyond security to the customers?

Dan (: 11:34

Yeah, it's a great question. I think it takes you back to when we were surveying our first building. We've been very fortunate at Smart Space’s that we've got some really great clients that were early adopters of our products and they literally threw us the keys. And these aren't just like a small 20,000 square foot office in a suburb. These are some of the world's leading real estate. And we were surveying the buildings and we're looking at all the different systems and sensors, including the cameras.

And we're looking at the PIR sensors and we're looking at another sensor for the smoke head and then another sensor for the HVAC system. And we're like, why are these not consolidated? And they're like, well that vendor provides the lighting so they've put their own sensor and they provide the HVAC so they put their own sensor. That's part of the security system to stand alone. And we're like, wow, there's a real opportunity to consolidate the amount of hardware you have in the space. And early on that was just literally using the occupancy sensors to also drive the HVAC and the lighting, rather than having a secondary PIR, which, it's an architect's dream because you're cleaning the soffit, the ceiling looks far better, but also you're saving money. And more importantly nowadays, you're saving like the manufacturing plastic and there's a really big sustainability element, plus a service element in the future.

And so after sort of tackling that with PIR sensors and presence detectors and occupancy monitors, we started to look at the cameras and thought, well, hang on. But that could give us a lot of what we want using machine vision or computer vision. And we noticed that actually in the retail industry, this was far more mature because you had a lot of security and surveillance on shops. And the technology went beyond our requirements. It could go into things like object recognition, facial detection, and so on. But our concerns were the video element.

It does have personal data. We didn't want to have to process that data locally on our systems if we could avoid it. What was really refreshing was to see companies like Access provide this as a JSON payload with no personally identifiable data, no camera feeds, so low bandwidth, high performance, high security. And that was the dream for Smart Spaces. So then we started to look at the designs and work out how many additional cameras do we need to get accurate occupancy on an office development? And, a lot of the times it's one or two cameras, or it's just moving a particular position. And we love that. It's sustainable. It saves the client money. It's less integrations for ourselves. And I selfishly, we're doing less integrations rather than more.

And I think, you know, Axis has been at the forefront of that and that's really helped us in terms of pushing our product forward, but also making sure that we're advising the client ethically. You know, we have been, someone's said to us before, you know, how do we know you're not just going to specify extra sensors to make more money? We're like, well, actually we don't typically buy the sensors your electrical contractor does, so we don't recognize that revenue. But no, we want simplicity. We want to sell our software. That's how our business works. We rely on our SaaS revenue to build the business and simplicity means actually we could have a greater margin in our SAS if we're doing one integration rather than five.

Steven Kenny (: 14:49

And I think if I understand you correctly, you're stripping out hardware and it's not just about the actual device cost, you're stripping out the infrastructure, the cabling costs, the huge significant sums of money in terms of installation. And if you can get so much more out of a single device.

I assume that you've got clients that have built some form of return on investment model and gone, okay, if we spend a little bit more here and we do a little bit more there, actually, this is the return on investment. And also, I guess that there's organizations that will say, “this will make us more profitable as a business because we're driving change in the behavior of our building.”

Dan (: 15:27

Oh, 100 % and what's really nice is these clients have a budget for the building and it's not meant for them to take that budget back and strip that out. They've actually just spent in other areas so that the building is improved as a whole. So, the budget for cabling for like you say all the sensors that are required for occupancy that's gone into providing better facilities management services like the cleaning sensors we have. So it's been great because we're just getting more out of the building because we haven't lost any data. It's not like we've sacrificed some occupancy data.

We've still got the same occupancy data, but the budget used for an additional sensor, which we've saved, goes into providing another facility. So, yeah, it's fantastic.

Steven Kenny (: 16:06

So if I look at this and I'm going to see one or two challenging conversations that you may potentially have had over the years, I hear this is going to benefit sort of the sustainability team. It's going to benefit procurement. It's going to benefit facilities management. It’s going to benefit so many stakeholders. How's the conversation gone with a traditional security manager that you now go, actually, your device is going to sit on a network. I need access to that data, please.

Dan (: 16:34

Yeah, I mean, it's a really great question. You do need a very open minded security manager or head of security. And a lot of them have just seen it as risk, risk, risk. So you have had to engage the other stakeholders and bring people together as a group. And typically where we have the most success is being led by a CIO or CTO or head of workplace, head of facilities who sees the bigger picture and can bring all of the team members on the journey.

But sometimes it's not that they might have a really open-minded security manager, but then they're like, “well my budget only allows for this and I just need to get the best security for that budget.” So sometimes the challenge is for us to go out and find additional budget for them. But that said, like anything, like our open-minded clients are now reaping the benefit of having our smart building technology and the return on investment across their portfolio, the security managers that have actually took the risk and gone, “no hang on this is the future.”

They're now the ones who are getting head hunted because they can provide so much more value. There's, so, my one thing for anyone works in the security industry that is managing these kind of projects, be open-minded, you know, and bring in other key stakeholders. And you could find that actually what you're delivering has a much greater impact on the business than just security alone.

Steven Kenny (: 17:52

I think when we've spoken to previous people around cyber security and they're looking at that convergence of technologies, exactly what you said there, bring different stakeholders from an organization, have a breakfast, have a coffee with them and find out what the capabilities are and just have a mature conversation. If I see this as a platform that is going to be distributed across lots of different sites. If I look at our traditional stakeholders within a security environment, they've been used to designing systems in the same way for many, many years.

Now, you sit as a layer on top of where the majority of building services and building systems sit, security being one of them. So you're going to be able to influence the design. How do you find that traditional security consultants or traditional system integrators, how are you having to educate them on what they need to do to design into your system? Because essentially they're being told by the customer, you need to make sure that your design fits within the way that we want our building to behave. How do we find those conversations because this is certainly something new to me and I guess it'll be certainly something new to the vast majority of the listeners.

Dan (: 19:13

Yeah. Yes, certainly. So we're in a great position to be able to provide documentation, specifications, training and a level of free consultancy to these security consultants. And again, coming back to these open-minded security managers, the exact same for the security consultants because they can learn what we do and they can apply that on future projects with other vendors. You know, everything Smart Spaces does is open protocol. So you can, the access API is available to any access partner.

And it's the same with other system vendors. So, look, let us help you. That's the key. We just want to sell our solution, as you can imagine. That's the way our business works. And if helping you design your solution helps us deliver the end product to the client. And we are quite fortunate at Smart Space is that we have a lot of smart building accredited providers that can help us implement that alongside the security consultants.

Steven Kenny (: 19:58

I think just moving forward, this will become a necessity for organizations. And I guess that as the expectations change and the security landscape is changing, but we also see that the security requirements will integrate into other business systems changes, that, as we've said in other areas around closed protocol systems, you either get on board or you get left behind.

And I guess you probably see that a lot with conversations with the stakeholders that you've had. There's going to be people that embrace it and run with it. And you've probably got a very fixed and loyal channel of organizations that are well embedded. And then you've probably had resistance where people have gone, not for us.

Dan (: 20:39

No, certainly, and you know, the sad thing in the industry that you get a lot of lies as well. So manufacturers have said, yes, yes, we do that. And you know, convince the consultant, the consultant signed off the tech sub. And you know, when we start the integration, we hit a roadblock straight away. So we typically will help out at the early stages and say that before you sign the tech sub off, get us some sample kit. We have a lab here in London where we've probably got every single manufacturer device, we need to start sending them back because we're paying storage.

But yeah, we will bench test it and prove it before you sign that tech sub and you've put a thousand of these units into a large building only to find out when the client asks for the use case that we promised before this solution was selected can't be delivered, which is an awkward conversation and know, not security so much, but in the lighting sector, we've had buildings where they've put...

And networking, you know, you've got to think after the data network and the power network, the lighting network is the biggest sensor network and grid you have in an office building if you're still using traditional cabled solutions. And there's systems in the market today, believe it or not, that haven't moved on from the 90s. They're 90s technology. They use 90s buses so they can have very limited data passed over that bus.

I once pointed out to someone who was about to sign up for TechSub that the PC in the brochure was a CRT monitor with Windows 95 on there. I was like, look, you're buying this technology from this date. I said, you might be thinking you're getting a great price, but all that system's ever going to provide is a closed loop network lighting control. And, you know, if you're looking to save energy in the future, you like to bring extra use cases in, it's going to be impossible to update. And being one of the biggest networks means that if you want to come back and retrofit that, it's going be one of the biggest costs.

And so it's not economically viable. So you need to make important decisions early on, on the vendors you select to make sure you're future-proofing your building. As AI is maturing, it's even more important that you have an interface that AI can interface with to improve your building.

Steven Kenny (: 22:47

That feels like a leading statement. So how do you think AI will change the game?

Dan (: 22:52

What's really helping us in terms of processing the amount of data that we collect, we collect terabytes of data per month per building. As you probably know from your cameras, we can get a data feed from yourselves less than every minute based on the amount of people that passing through a zone within a building. So every minute of every day over every month starts to build up to be a huge data set. How much of that granular data do you need versus aggregated data? And how do you free, say the security manager has a very different query and concern and question to mine from that data set than say head of workplace or head of facilities.

And we found that Smart Spaces a couple of years back, we were spending most of the time doing custom reports, which is expensive because it means we had to add headcount in our data science teams to be able to do this. And the best thing was our investment in AI when we hired Alex Michaels.

And he's built out a self-service reporting dashboard which leverages both an LLM but also ML to be able to do self-service dashboards so people can write their own queries. And it's interesting, like the different reports we get, and it's gave us more insight into how a product functions in a building than we had previously.

Steven Kenny (: 24:06

That's a great point because when people talk around how we use AI and some of the potential and the capabilities and how we're going to be deploying it, everyone thinks that it will be focused on the improvements to the behavior of the technology, so the camera. When in reality, some of the biggest areas that we will see that will benefit the industry is in technical support, in how we can communicate with people, how we can provide, or we can analyze data very quickly and efficiently to make sure that the operational uptime is improved. And that is all AI. So people don't necessarily view it and see it in that way.

Dan (: 24:42

Yeah, I totally agree. Probably the biggest impact on our business is not just how we put AI into the product, but how our development team use AI for quality assurance, for software development, for security. They leverage these tools, which has meant that we've got a bigger workforce. Our workforce is more productive than it's ever been leveraging these tools.

Steven Kenny (: 25:05

You referenced their security and as you are now a layer that gets visibility and access to lots of and lots of different devices all across lots of different networks probably in different countries all at the same time. What level of sort of due diligence is being done on your organization so people feel comfortable giving you access to all of this information?

Dan (: 25:25

Yes, so we're SOC 2 type 2 accredited and we undergo a pen test on our solution every year, but also a pen test on every client deployed solution. So we can have up to, in any one year, 30 to 40 individual pen tests and typically they're not the same company. The client will suggest their company and it's great actually to see different levels of sophistication between different cybersecurity companies.

And we continually make improvements to our platform to improve the security and things like monitoring, font firmware, patches, network design. And the thing that scares the life out of us is not the new projects where we can implement this day one, but the retrofit projects where I think I mentioned it to you previously, we've gone to a building, we've looked at the network design, we've connected our interface into the building to scan the network and we've noticed that the building has a flat network.

And that meant that the cameras, the access control controllers, the lighting controllers, the BMS controllers, all reside on the same network. And we quickly identified that, you know, I could pop outside, take the Cat 6 cable out of a camera, pop it into my laptop, and I could switch the chillers off, I could move you up and down in a lift. I could take full control of a building from outside the building with just a laptop that had an Ethernet cable. And so...

No, straight away, we're saying to that client, you need to disconnect this network from the internet. You need now to implement a network design. We can assist with that design, but we want to bring consultants in for that. Bear in mind, we're a software service company. We're there to sell our software. So we'll bring in partners to help deliver that, but we can advise on how to secure it. And I don't think the client really understood how unsecure their building was.

Steven Kenny (: 27:14

Unfortunately, I am absolutely not surprised by that comment. I'm seeing it firsthand. We have seen the behavior of people at work in these sites. We've seen the way systems have been designed, creating unnecessary vulnerabilities that really should have been addressed in day one. But I guess from a reassurance point of view, it's nice to know and to truly understand that actually when people want to connect all of these different systems together, there is a platform and a layer that sits above them that is secure. And that is one, if that's not done correctly and there are issues there, that can create a whole host of risk. So let's think long term. Now, where do you see the industry is going in, say, the next five years? I know that like digital transformation, business optimization, industrial optimization, all of these conversations, they've picked up some serious momentum in the last 24 months. And it's picking up pace quickly. How do you see that moving forward and how that impact in smart spaces?

Dan (: 28:18

Yeah, so I think the waste will disappear. I think legislation will help with that, where people have legal quotas to meet for carbon, so they have to make change rather than it being a recommended change. I think we're quite fortunate at Smart Spaces, we have the 360 feedback loop, so when we make a change, so we delay a time of switching the HVAC on, for instance, if we do get feedback that the space is too cold or complaints, we're there to handle those and we can make sure that people are still comfortable. And at the end of the day, we need to develop a product that's relevant to the end user and the buildings need to be the same. So, you've got to save energy, but also make sure you've got really high customer satisfaction. I think the best thing is the next generation that's starting to join the workforce, they care more about this. And so, the dashboards that we've found that typical legacy employees haven't been so engaged with.

When we display in the reception of a building how much energy they're saved through gray water harvesting, through solar, through deploying our system, they're the one taking note of it and actually giving us feedback and asking us how we can do more. So I think that's going to be a key piece. And I think things will become more passive in terms of, you know, at the moment, majority of interaction with smart spaces will be through your smartphone. You know, most users will use the smartphone to engage with the building.

That could be disappear and sit in the background. I think technologies like ultra wide band, where the credential can be part of your phone, part of your glasses. And I think that's where Axis and the camera technology comes in. We can link an identity from a camera to an identity object on the person. And we can have a really nice passive access control system where as long as that person has an authenticated device on them, the lift gets called for them, even the coffee gets ordered without them having to do it and delivered to them.

And I think that will be the next phase. You're not going to have to even tap. You're just going to have to walk in and everything will happen. But if you happen to be a bad actor, you're coming in and you haven't got the credential, security can very passively but politely ask you to move on. They don't need to have barriers. You don't need to make the building look like it's somewhere that's not approachable, but you can ensure that someone who's not authenticated can't get in at the same time.

Steven Kenny (: 31:29

So do you think the discussions around frictionless access control, so instead of a building looking like Fort Knox where it's going to be a nightmare to get in, do you think that frictionless access control will truly become a reality?

Dan (: 31:40

Yeah, we're already seeing it in the parking. The ANPR link to the ultra wide band credential is great. So you know that person's authenticated, but also their number plates recognized. So they're getting into the car park. We need that in the office. We need that from the street to seat. You want to be able to just walk in. Why are you getting your phone out? I'm one of these people, when I come into the office in the morning, I've typically got a coffee in one hand, I've got my bag in the other hand, I've got my coat probably as well, I've come out the gym and it's too warm to wear it.

And I've got all these things I'm carrying and then I'm thinking, I've got to get my phone out of my pocket, I've got to authenticate, I've got to get into the building. Why is that just not authenticating for me? And why is that camera not monitoring that I am who I say I am? That's got to come, and we've been working on it to date, it's not perfect. But I certainly think that would be the biggest thing from a user experience improvement we'll see in the next couple of years.

Steven Kenny (: 31:40

So just as we wrap up, what should your last takeaway be for the audience today?

Dan (: 31:47

I would say that, like, don't be afraid to embrace smart building technology. So if you are that security manager and you're thinking, well, hang on, this is not my concern, I think the impact you can have on your business, and if we can help you articulate that back to the wider business, the security team could be empowered to actually be the ones that pioneer smart building technology within their company. And they should be rewarded for that.

Steven Kenny (: 32:14

Dan, it’s been an absolute pleasure. I've thoroughly enjoyed today's conversation. I know that organizations that are on their digital transformation journey, looking at building smart environments, smart buildings will genuinely benefit from this discussion today. So, on that note, thank you very much for joining us on Security Tech Talk today. Thank you.

Dan (: 32:33

Thanks Stephen, I look forward to seeing you out in Dubai.

Steven Kenny (: 32:40

Thank you.

Steven Kenny (: 32:43

Thanks for tuning in to Security Tech Talk. If you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to check out the other episodes for more insightful discussion and expert perspectives. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. This podcast is brought to you by Axis Communications. Axis enables a smarter and safer world by creating solutions for improving security and business performance.