10. Identify and explain the major barriers or impediments to commercialization or widespread deployment of your technology. Describe how a GPG performance study will help overcome the identified barriers.
Potential barriers may include new to market, limited awareness, lack of field implementation, and cost of or other barriers to entry. When explaining the value of a GPG project to this technology, please expand beyond targeting GSA as a large potential customer. What would you hope to prove about your technology? (Limit 2500 characters)
Open Energy connects building automation data to Drupal web sites. This ability to link Drupal with BACnet is new, so there is limited awareness of how and why it should be done. It requires new levels of coordination between facility management and IT personnel, which may well be the biggest barrier to entry.
Energy dashboard products have been available for many years yet they remain costly to implement and limited in scope. Licensing, software and hosting fees have restricted use to highly polished, dedicated, energy focused sites that receive little Internet traffic. If you compare building automation systems and energy dashboards to a circus, they are a one trick pony. They do one thing very well, but once you've seen it the attraction fades.
However, Drupal is no one trick pony. Rather than simply being great as one act in the show, Drupal can carry the entire event. With over 14,000 modules Drupal can empower teams to create: Blogs, forums, e-commerce, CRM, intranets, social networks, news aggregators, wikis, photo galleries, academic research sites, and so on. If you can imagine it, Drupal can make it a reality.[i] Open Energy brings real time energy and environmental data to this event, helping to make it the greatest CMS on earth.
Building for the future requires us to think beyond programmatic lines. Architects designing buildings must select HVAC and electrical system controls not only to maximize energy efficiency and occupant comfort, but also to present high value information in a broadly accessible context. To keep up with the pace of change in technology, we need to securely architect open energy concepts into our systems for interoperability, openness and efficiency. We need to apply common standards and more rapidly share the lessons learned by early adopters. We need to produce better content and data, and present it through multiple channels in a program and device-agnostic way.[ii]
A GPG performance study will help identify an efficient workflow required to enrich the on-line user experience with open energy data. It will demonstrate that a new energetic form of web content can be intermixed with traditional web content. It will identify areas where user interaction can be increased. And, in doing so, it will increase the value of existing websites, increase web traffic, and help make the user workplace more comfortable and efficient by helping to conserve resources.
[i] http://stauffer.com/blog/2013/03/22/why-drupal-greatest-cms-earth
[ii] http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/egov/digital-government/digital-government.html