Tom Pincince
As President and CEO, Tom Pincince is responsible for overall strategy and management of Digital Lumens, the worldwide leader in enterprise-scale intelligent lighting systems. A serial entrepreneur, Tom joined Digital Lumens from the networking industry, having served as President, CEO and Founder of Brix Networks, and Founder of New Oak Communications, a pioneering leader in Virtual Private Network (VPN) switches, which was subsequently acquired by Bay Networks (now Nortel Networks). Before starting New Oak, Tom was an industry analyst, serving as Director of Forrester Research’s Network Strategy Service, where he focused on the commercial use of the Internet, and defined the market for corporate intranets and the possibilities of private data services over the public Internet. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Neural Science from Brown University, where he was also a founding board member of the Brown Entrepreneurship Program. Tom also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Boston Museum of Science.
Smart building: Building bridges between IT and facilities
Building organizational bridges across the enterprise is critical to ensure successful IoT deployments.
With the proliferation of IoT-enabled systems and devices across the physical environment, the IoT is already embedded in the enterprise, often deep inside the industrial infrastructure. Generating terabytes of data, sensor-laden objects — lighting, HVAC systems, thermostats, beacons, and others — justify their cost based on the business benefits alone. Whether for energy savings, process efficiency, worker tracking, threat detection, or other purposes, facilities engineering teams are procuring these sensors and systems to address business needs. The challenge? Buildings are getting smarter without explicit or intentional involvement from IT, creating missed opportunities to leverage these assets and their data, and to align with a broader IT strategy.
While IT focuses on the computing and network infrastructure rather than the physical environment, facilities teams are deploying a new layer of smart devices across the infrastructure, without thinking that these objects are actually a series of data-generating nodes on the corporate network. To extract maximum value from these new, smart, networked devices, organizations need to redefine the historically challenged relationship between facilities and IT teams. While facility managers handle everything from plant operations, HVAC systems, maintenance teams, and snow removal, they are now also a new customer or partner for IT as buildings become instrumented. IT teams are subject matter experts and strategic partners that can ensure technology acquisitions within the physical environment will integrate with the other systems across the enterprise.
In fact, for the deployment of IoT technologies across the enterprise, there are obvious questions that IT is particularly well suited to address: Read more…