Ken Nagy, CFA
Sierra Monitor Corporation (SRMC) designs and develops hazardous gas monitoring devices for the protection of personnel and facilities in industrial work places. Through its subsidiary FieldServer Technologies the firm has branched into protocol translation technology, which enables machine to machine (M2M) communication in energy and building automation applications. This high growth business should complement the gas detection business, while not sacrificing market or margins. FieldServer should see a tailwind as a result of the push toward zero net energy building designs.
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) is located on the coast of the red sea approximately eighty kilometers north of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Construction of the university involved a multi-billion dollar effort by a consortium of engineering and construction contractors. The entire campus, including nineteen massive academic buildings, hundreds of town center buildings and over a thousand student and faculty buildings is monitored and controlled via a system known as ICAS (Inter Campus Automation System). ICAS tracks every electrical and security device in the infrastructure including lights, window shades, motion sensors, fire alarm panels, computer screens, temperatures, water flow, and many other devices and parameters.
During construction the ICAS integrator used Sierra Monitor FieldServers for two primary tasks. The first was to interface to all academic building lighting panels. The second task was to interface to hundreds of fire panels distributed throughout the academic buildings, town center and residences. FieldServer supplied the interface products through a series of orders beginning in the second half of 2009 and continuing to the present including an order to be shipped in Q4 of 2010. In addition to the supply of products FieldServer provided fee based remote technical support and also supplied three application engineers for a total of ten weeks of on-site support in Saudi Arabia. Due to the fact that all equipment used at KAUST must have a communication protocol known as BACnet it is very likely that there are many more FieldServer devices deployed in equipment at the university but sold through OEM channels to equipment manufacturers.
The KAUST project represents an excellent example of how FieldServer products and services can offer very high value technical solutions in multifaceted monitoring and control applications.
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