PRESENTATION
2018 - PI World - San Francisco - Academic Symposium
The Journey from a Classroom Idea to Commercialization of an Energy Management Company
The path to commercialization of any new idea, product or company takes many twists and turns as it progressively develops and materializes. This presentation will describe our journey. Beginning as a novel classroom research idea with the Building Ideas Group (BIG), to a cloud-based building Energy Management as a Service (EMaaS) company.
BIG started in 2011 at Carnegie Mellon University, School of Architecture under professor Azizan Aziz. This classroom project turned into years of research, including over $2M in federal, state, and local grant funds as well as in kind licensing from companies such as Microsoft and OSISoft.
The outcome became the BuildFIT building energy management software portfolio positioned as one of the leading software packages in the burgeoning Energy Management as a Service (EMaaS) industry, using the OSISoft asset framework and time series database.
Company
Carnegie Mellon University
Speaker
Azizan Aziz
Azizan Aziz – Building Ideas Group - CEO/CTO is the founder of the BuildFIT software application and Building Ideas Group. Azizan has extensive experience in the design of integrated systems for high performance buildings including post occupancy evaluation and building performance monitoring and analytics. He has led numerous innovative data analytics projects with federal, corporate and municipal organizations and thought leaders. Azizan is also an Assistant Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
Company
Building Ideas Group
Speaker
Mike Broeker
Mike Broeker – Building Ideas Group - President/COO was most recently the President/COO of Epiphany Solar Water Systems. Mike has a 20+ year history of developing new organizations with a focus on software and infrastructure. Mike was formerly President of Sierra w/o Wires, a Pittsburgh based IT managed services company. Under Mike’s leadership, Sierra was the first organization to bring cloud computing to Pittsburgh in 2008, and was voted PA IT company of the year in 2012. Mike was also VP of Technology for Development Dimensions International, growing their online presence from $18M to $75M in 5 years.