DSW is working closely with the Cisco Connected Real Estate (CRE) team at Cisco along with building developers and controls manufacturers to bring converged facilities applications to markets. CRE comprises solutions that focus on the convergence of IT and building systems onto a common IP infrastructure, reducing operating costs and improving productivity. Cisco Connected Real Estate creates a framework designed to create value for building and campus occupants. An 'intelligent' connected building uses an integral network to reduce capital and operating expenditures for key stakeholders over the building's lifecycle and creates more productive and flexible workplaces through scalable collaboration, mobility and remote connectivity tools.
Connected Real Estate is the embodiment of that revolution. It harnesses the power of Internet Protocol (IP) to turn traditional building construction and management paradigms on their heads. In so doing CCRE will bring huge financial and operational advantages not only to the construction, real estate and property services industries.
Until recently, the network was acknowledged as merely pervasive but now, with the advent of Internet Protocol (IP), it has become ubiquitous. Today, global business and the public sector cannot operate without it. Real estate – from terraced houses and towering office blocks to shopping malls and sprawling airports – is all interconnected. In fact alongside water, gas and electricity the network has acquired its own utility status.
Cisco Connected Real Estate (CCRE) takes that network utility into the very foundation of modern buildings, driven by two rapidly coalescing market forces:
The problem that CRE addresses is that currently most buildings and campuses today are constructed with multiple proprietary networks to run systems such as HVAC, security and access, energy, lighting, and fire and safety as well as separate voice and data telecommunications networks. As a result we see buildings that are complex to operate, with high installation, integration and ongoing maintenance costs, and limited automation functionality. The CRE framework promotes the convergence of these numerous networks onto the open standard of IP to streamline processes by providing a single connection for all building and IT systems.
CRE leverages the Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) architecture. More than ever, IT organizations are under pressure to improve profitability with technology implementations linked to business objectives. Cisco believes that as the backbone for IT communications, the network element of enterprise architecture is increasingly critical.
As the backbone for IT communications, the network element SONA is Cisco's architectural approach for designing advanced network capabilities into your infrastructure. SONA provides guidance, best practices, and blueprints for connecting network services to applications to enable business solutions.
A primary benefit of Cisco SONA is in standardizing and consolidating IT infrastructure, a proven way to reduce TCO for enterprises. Industry research by Gartner and others has shown that operational costs constitute 80 percent or more of the TCO over the lifecycle of the asset. Standardization is known to save operational costs: a study of large enterprises by the Hackett Group showed that companies that have implemented standards for vendors, technologies, networks, applications, and data have operations costs 23 percent lower than other companies. These savings are due to improvements in IT efficiency—more IT services delivered per unit of IT resource.
