lighting companies morph into IT firms

　　Barclays Plc has deployed a series of heat and motion sensors that help analyze office space usage at investment banking facilities in London.

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　　It's the sort of system that lighting vendors are offering as part of their push into the Internet of Things (IoT), with one glaring difference: Barclays does not appear to be housing the sensors within the lighting infrastructure to turn this into a smart building.

　　Rather, it is deploying black boxes mounted underneath employees' desks, according to a recent article by Bloomberg.

　　The boxes, called OccupEye and provided by British company Cad-Capture, gather occupancy data and tie it into a cloud-connected dashboard system that helps Barclays decipher how efficiently or wastefully it is using space.

　　“By efficiently optimizing space, OccupEye will also allow energy managers to deliver energy savings via intelligent building management,” Cad-Capture says on its website. “For example, if your company has 300 employees spread disparately across 5 floors, you are effectively running an inefficient building and more than likely to be receiving excessive utility bills. OccupEye sensors will allow energy managers to easily identify and analyze utilization trends, e.g., peaks and troughs. As a result, the managers can relocate staff accordingly, use the data for energy audit reports and significantly reduce energy costs... The solution comprises an unlimited number of wireless workplace utilization sensors which transmit utilization data to a small number of strategically positioned network receivers, which in turn feed the ‘raw’ occupancy logs back to client specific cloud-based analytics systems... Through our state-of-the-art web-based dashboard, users enjoy absolute control over data reporting and analysis.”