Kirsten:


Welcome to expanding the possible. This podcast from HH Angus explores how engineering is advancing the built environment - from innovations in building systems to the Internet of Things, from digital services connecting the modern workplace to combating the impact of climate change, we delve into exciting developments in today's and tomorrow's building infrastructure. In this episode of expanding the possible, I'm joined by Augusto Valdivia and Scott Bentley, both members of HH Angus' digital services team. Welcome to both of you.



Scott:

Thank you for having us.



Kirsten:

You both recently attended the Amazon Web Services re:Invent Conference in Las Vegas. For our listeners who may not be familiar with this global event, can you tell us a little bit about what it is?



Scott:

re:Invent is the largest technology conference of the year put on by Amazon. Specific to Amazon technology, of course. It is a technology-focused conference. It is a place where they go over all the existing technologies, they provide sessions and workshops, and experts are on hand to talk to you. You can talk to all sorts of people who work for AWS and other people in the industry. I was told that there were 55,000 attendees, of which Augusto and I were two, which was fantastic, we enjoyed ourselves very much. It is a place where technologists go to learn about the new trends and the new technologies, and to understand what's going on in the industry.



Kirsten:

As I mentioned at the start, we are an engineering consulting firm and we're focused on the built environment. Augusto, what was interesting to you as a member of the digital services team about attending this event?



Augusto:

The main objective to go there was to learn about what technology companies are using to collect data and to present it and securely. Another factor was to understand what AWS is bringing to the market for new resources and how we can use these new resources with our current or newest clients.



Scott:

Great rundown Augusto. As Augusto says, data is the product these days. If you have data then you have something that's valuable, and that's true of every company, even individuals. Now, Our clients have a lot of data and we want to learn how to capitalize on this, how to maximize the value of this for us and our clients and re:Invent was a great place to be to learn about Amazon-focused technologies and solutions to this.



Kirsten:

Did you see any key trends down there that would be particularly interesting to our listeners, and to our clients perhaps?



Augusto:

Machine learning was a big hit. Data integration, data visualization, and the use of data for simulations, for disaster recoveries, for cities and geospatial data collection, also for global problems. One big hit that we saw was IoT and that's what we are doing right now and that's was very exciting for our team to lead that life,[KN1]to have the opportunity to speak with other experts about this topic and to collect a lot of ideas and tips that we can use with, again with our current customers and with future new ones.



Scott:

One of the terms that keeps coming up is smart buildings, smart cities. Our clients are very interested in that and understanding it, learning more about it. They want to understand the trends and where it's going and so it was very interesting at the conference to see that there was a deep focus on IoT and machine learning. There were a number of interesting things that we learned there.



Kirsten:

You were talking about the Internet of Things, specifically smart cities, smart buildings. We have our own Smart buildings committee here at HH Angus, so we have a lot of people who are very focused on where that technology is going and particularly how it can serve our customers. So, what did you take away from that? Because I find it fascinating that all these technologies are out there. How do you start to focus in on what's going to be of use to our clients in any particular application?



Scott:

With our clients, we talk to them and find out what their needs are. And we've been learning what their focus is, which is very important at the conference. I would say that the industry focus as it pertains to the built environment has very much been on digital twinning. There were numerous sessions and workshops on the various technologies and architectures that AWS enables for this sort of thing. We met a number of people working for AWS who are working in projects for that. I learned that Amazon itself has an internal project to digitally twin every building and system that they own, with the purpose of finding energy efficiency and becoming carbon neutral, which is fantastic; and they're learning to build the tools that they're giving to the rest of us in their attempts to do that. They're learning by doing, which is a really powerful way to serve the market, I think. We also met all sorts of people who were interested in this sort of thing. One of the first people I met when I arrived in Las Vegas was a a man who works for the ‘Fed’ in San Francisco; as he said in in his words, “I work in the department of ‘we shred money’ ”. And he was telling me about how they have so many colocations, they own all sorts of warehouses of old technology, but they're moving that into the cloud. And Amazon is a preferred partner. Understanding that these very important entities and organizations are going in that direction, I think, speaks volumes.



Kirsten:

Talking about the cloud, what are some of the cloud solutions that your team is developing for our clients?



Scott:

We have a number of clients, some we've been working with for more than a year. We have a healthcare client that we’re doing a space occupancy project for. They came to us to try to understand the occupancy within their RAC (rapid assessment centre). And we said “sure we can help with that. We'll reach out, try to understand your use cases.” So, we've been hooking up various types of sensors; some sensors monitor large spaces, some monitor small spaces, some monitor traffic flow. We take all of that data we bring it into the cloud for them where we've set up a data link, and there are analytical dashboards that we've worked to provide to them. Some of them are quite complex now. The insights they're getting are helping them to understand the usage of their space and there's now a new phase to this centre. They're building a second one and we're also outfitting that phase of the centre. And we are working towards a single pane of glass on this to help them understand the larger spaces and to understand how to organize the spaces more effectively or efficiently. This is very important in healthcare right now. With the pandemic and the difficulties with staffing and the shortcomings in funding, we found that healthcare clients are very, very interested in this. So that project is ongoing, and we continue to work with them to understand new use cases and to come up with new analysis, and also to help them to understand how they can take the data and do more with it themselves.



Kirsten:

You're also working in the financial sector, I understand?



Scott:

Yes, we have a large client in the financial sector. I won't say their name. We've been working with them for more than a year as well. They are also interested in occupancy. We started off with environmental. (this was during the pandemic); their interest was to make their staff feel safer at the office. To do that, we were taking information from their existing HVAC system, which conveniently had a lot of sensors built-in. We were taking this data and helping to do analysis that would show air exchanges to see whether they met the ASHRAE standard. This was used to create a 3D digital twin so that we could say “the environment here is safe according to standards” and allow staff to see that and feel safe in the environment in which they're working. Since the pandemic more or less has ended, it's morphed more into an occupancy project. Now they're more interested in going forward with understanding the use of their spaces, and it has expanded to two or three of their buildings, and we are continuing with the 3D digital twin. We are continuing with the 2D dashboarding analysis. We found that there is value to both a 3-dimensional digital twin for visualization - it makes certain things very understandable - and there's value to the 2D analysis, and we use QuickSight for that. We're also looking into Grafana now to enhance that and make it pop a little more, but the 2D analysis is kind of where it's at for the really in-depth understandings. But we are finding that people really like to have both.



Augusto:

For our listeners, QuickSight and Grafana are dashboards where they can interact either from historical data or real time. And one other interesting point from what Scott just mentioned is that when we started with this project, they were looking at some sort of problem, but now they found other issues that we are helping to solve and this is now how we are moving from one building to two more, because they loved what they saw. The idea is to transform these buildings into smart buildings because that's the trend the company is trying to go to. We also have a university project coming with solar panels that we are collecting data from, and that the teachers are going to use that data for the students so they can start interacting with this type of technology from the university level. We have telecommunications customers for whom we are monitoring core locations to see the trends of the space behavior and whether they need to be aware of differences. IoT devices in these small core locations allow us to read temperatures of like spaces. So now we can provide an alerting system that can be collected in real time from customers, and they can act immediately in the event something is malfunctioning. Now they don't need to wait for weeks or months, they can just go and fix the problem or find somebody who is closest to that location to go verify if it is absent running; it could be that the colocation is overheating, is about to burn down, or somebody just broke in, and so many, many, cases that happen, right?



Scott:

Augusta is talking about Angus Remote Systems Management. It's actually a web-based application that we've been developing. We have an MVP at this point, but it's evolving rapidly. We think there's huge value. It actually came out of the recognition for the need for riser management. It started off as sort of an engineering document management - a bit of workflow for certain processes, a bit of a work order system - and evolved with this whole IoT and digital twinning dashboarding because our clients have expressed deep interest in being able to wire up these bases to understand the environment, to understand occupancy, to understand security. People coming in and out of these spaces are tenanted and so they need to understand the electronic locks and who's accessing things; all of these are features that already exist or are in development. This is maybe one of the biggest non-secret secrets in the company, it's a very exciting product for us. We are doing some very amazing things, very high-level things, and the knowledge and the application of that knowledge is something that our team has been really excelling at and now the clients are coming to us.



Augusto:

It’s good to see that the value of the project is growing so fast that even people from AWS are trying to get our product into a presentation at re:Invent.It’s good to also to mention that, as a consulting company, we are also certified as a partner with AWS. We are very close to go to the second level where we can provide more specific technology advice to our customers. And I think that's a very important point for our listeners to understand - that we are part of the partnership program with AWS already.



Scott:

There's a very long and complex process to become a partner with Amazon, but we are now a select partner.



Kirsten:

re:Invent is known not just for announcing new technology, but also for being quite a fun time. What were some of the highlights apart from the what you were learning about technology



Scott:

Well, for me there was so much there. It was almost a wonderland. It was really great. I really loved the sessions and the workshops and just the educational nature. When I got there, there were so many people I talked to, so many people, peers who knew the industry and understood the technologies that that you could talk to. And the whole atmosphere was very collaborative and very educational. It was almost like being back in university, except you're talking almost on the same level with the professors. You get to talk about what's exciting to them too, right? So that aspect was great. We also had all sorts of learning sessions outside of the workshops and things they set up places where you can talk to experts on the side. I met numerous people that way. I met T Luke from Amazon's Green efforts and Christopher Azer from their IoT. Augusto, you met a number of people there.



Augusto:

I met a lot of my community builders, as I am also an AWS community builder. The community builder program is where people from around the world are accepted to write about and educate other people who are trying to break into the industry. We write articles, we do video, we do podcasts. We use different channels to introduce AWS to people trying to break into industry, but also to those who are already there or have a lot of experience. We share our experience through our work in articles. One thing that I would like to add is about the connection with people. People were the key there. We met a lot of people that we were able to present our current projects to, and the feedback that we received (a goal was to take home the feedback that we received) was always very positive. They were impressed by what we are doing and we felt that we are pioneers in what we're doing right now. And I think that what we are doing today is going to bring us to the next level, in how we provide the services in different ways. The feedback that we received was so good! One of the IT evangelists who saw our projects got interested and is considering putting our name forward for the list for 2023 re:Invent. We might have a space to present a project there, which is a huge market for the company; also being recognized that we are doing the right thing and doing an amazing job.



Scott:

It's an acknowledgement.



Augusto:

Yeah, it is…it is an honor, because digital services [at HH Angus] is only 1 1/2 years old , so it's like you are getting to that level of re:Invent where huge companies and big names are there presenting. So, I felt honored and impressed, and happy obviously about the job that we are doing right now.



Kirsten:

It’s very exciting, but it’s also very affirming, as you were saying Scott, an acknowledgement of what your team has been able to do with what the company’s doing for our clients and how we are helping to push the boundaries of this whole sector forward.



Scott:

That is in fact an interesting point, that we feel we're quite advanced given we haven't really been around all that long, but we've certainly progressed very quickly and become very knowledgeable very quickly. And it shows because I was speaking with people in one of the IoT sessions and our solutions are actually not that different from some of the solutions that Amazon themselves have been employing internally and with some partners to develop in the energy sector. So, it was interesting to note that these technologies are very enabling for people who have a mind to go down that route. And I think that what we can do for our clients will be absolutely amazing.



Kirsten:

I think your team and the company as a whole are known for being early adopters of technology. That's been true with Revit and it's been true with digital twins, and Matterport scanning and so on. I know with the Revit team, they've been helping to provide feedback to the developers. So I think it speaks well of the company culture that we do embrace this technology at an early stage and can bring the learnings to support what our customers’ needs are in their built environment. Let's talk about the key takeaways for you. Augusto, I'll start with you and what were your top takeaways from this conference?



Augusto:

I think for me it was this new way of seeing my job, my role. And it comes to the principles and values that AWS is trying to promote. One of them, for example, related to the IoT industry, what they call zero trust and protection principles. I was able to collect that information that I can use in my daily routines at work, and use the best practices and best principles to protect my team; not only my team, but also to protect the data that we are collecting and to protect our customer because they are the most important part of what we do.



Kirsten:

And Scott, were your key takeaways?



Scott:

The industry is very much moving towards smart buildings and smart cities. It seems to be dominated by a desire for efficiency to increase the green quotient. Amazon is very much dedicated to this. I am impressed by the level of support that Amazon gives, that they've been very good to provide a lot of information and a lot of contacts and have been very good to us. I have a lot of technical takeaways. Maybe the overarching takeaways is clearly the direction that things are going in and, as Augusto alluded to, security is a very large concern for many people, especially the cloud. I think Amazon has been a leader in this industry to not just try to assuage fears but actually implement hard solutions that that make this feasible and trustworthy and, you know, we build that into what we do every day as well. Augusto spends a lot of time just researching. I spend a lot of time learning - we're going after certifications. The certification pathways are quite good and very, very helpful for both learning and being able to show that we know what we're talking about.



Augusto:

One special takeaways I have is how many industries nowadays are coming to the cloud. And it's not surprising, how cloud is innovating and enhancing, and facilitating many of the world’s industries. Being able to enrich what they do, because that's the key about the power of cloud, right? So if you couldn't do something that's on premise because the technology you have didn't allow you, now you have cloud that can bring you to the next level and improve your company and improve the economy of the company, improve your services, and obviously, it makes your services more flexible, because now it's not only local, now you have a global expansion because of the solutions that AWS provide.



Kirsten:

That's great. They’re very exciting developments and hopefully we can look forward to seeing the HH Angus team presenting at re:Invent next year.  Just before I let you both go, I noticed you're both wearing lovely AWS hoodies. How was the swag?



Scott:

Sure, the swag was amazing.



Augusto:

Yeah, it was. Hearing from other people, I thought it was going to be a little bit more like overwhelming, but it was very organized, I think because we still live in the pandemic world and everything was very spread around. I love all the socks that I got.



Scott:

You walk in and you get your pass and right behind you is a big swag stand and you go in there and they can size you for the hoodie that we got, but they also had a number of T-shirts and stickers and little toys and all sorts of things. We also got swag at some of the after parties, which I don't know if we're supposed to talk about those.



Kirsten:

We'll save that for after the conversation. Augusto Valdivia and Scott Bentley, thank you both so much for sharing your impressions of the Amazon Web Services re:Invent Conference. I'm glad in this case that what happened in Vegas didn't have to stay in Vegas. Thank you to our listeners for joining us today. Please stay tuned for more Expanding the Possible podcast coming soon.



Scott:

Thank you.



Augusto:

Kirsten, thank you.