Advancing and securing the platform
“We don’t make Angry Birds.”
That’s Dan Giorgis’ simple way of describing the heart of Tridium: a company, now in its 20th year, that builds products and applications to solve real-world problems for businesses—saving money and time, and helping organizations run more efficiently.
“So many of the applications you see being developed these days are for entertainment or social media, and those things have their place in society for sure,” says Giorgis, a senior software engineer at Tridium.
“But the products we build are not like that—companies use them to run their businesses, and that is pretty cool.”
Giorgis grew up with a keen interest in math and science, inspired by his father, an engineer who built radar defense systems. The younger Giorgis studied electrical engineering at Virginia Tech—a major that was a process of elimination, he says, as he didn’t like chemistry or statistics, and with the Cold War winding down, didn’t think aerospace engineering would be as in-demand.
He began his career in an environmental controls company, fine-tuning intelligent automation systems and helping the firm make the transition from ’70s-era pneumatics to digital controls. A former engineer at the company, Jerry Frank, had just founded a startup called Tridium and approached Giorgis about joining.
At first, he was unsure, skittish at the risk associated with joining an unproven company.
“But my wife convinced me it was the right move, and encouraged me to do it,” he says. It was 1996, and he jumped in and became one of the initial six employees at Tridium, a team that implemented the original lines of code on the initial product releases—lines that now reach into the millions.
Leading platforming: the overhaul of the JACE
One of Tridium’s dichotomies is that, while the company builds a software framework, many customers want a complete solution to include hardware such as the JACE® optimized to run Niagara. Its latest iteration, the JACE 8000, is a complete reworking of the controller, optimized for Niagara 4.
“We have been evolving the JACE platform over the years, but with the JACE 8000, we went back to the drawing board rather than trying incremental change and updates,” Giorgis says. “We started from scratch.”
What we were going out to do was to bring open systems to a proprietary market and really trying to help systems integrators, end users and building owners.”
Changes include faster speed, more memory and removable media. A more modular design makes it easier to install, integrate and deploy. Wi-Fi connectivity also gives users the ability to display data on mobile devices.
“We had a lot of requests over the years for a local display on the JACE, but to be honest, display technology moves so quickly, and since everybody already carries a display in their pocket, it made sense to use the smartphone or tablet as the display for the JACE controls,” he says.
Security on the hardware was also upgraded with Secure Boot, which guarantees that hardware is running trusted Tridium software. Temperature range was also increased from commercial to industrial requirements, in both hot and cold environments.
Giorgis is also a regular point person at Tridium in times when customers have issues and require technical support. He’s a regular voice on message boards and newsgroups, helping the community diagnose and treat issues that arise, and share fixes and workarounds. At the Niagara Summit, he enjoys being able to meet and see the faces of the people he communicates with online. “The Summit is a great place to hear from people and learn about their needs,” he says. “ We have people who are very excited and passionate about what we’re building, and it’s good to be able to take their feedback and continuously improve our product line.”
Where to now?
Those at Tridium are fond of noting, with a sense of pride, that the company was working in the Internet of Things long before the IoT was, in fact, a thing.
Giorgis and the Tridium team are hard at work building an infrastructure that will give the Niagara Framework® better scalability to take advantage of cloud technologies. In doing so, Niagara will be increasingly pushed down into smaller devices and sensors, allowing people and machines to communicate like never before. He is excited to see what systems integrators will do with the framework’s forthcoming capabilities. That level of customization, he says, “is the power of Niagara.”
“There’s a certain cool factor in what we’re making and what our partners are doing with it,” Giorgis says. “Niagara zealots have really bought into what we do, and it has enabled them to build entire businesses around that. It’s incredible to see them take our product and build tens of millions of systems on top of it. That’s pretty amazing.”
HACKING A NERF GUN
There’s no telling where Niagara will end up.
At the Tridium headquarters in suburban Richmond, Va., one instance—in the hundreds of thousands of Niagara instances around the globe—included a Nerf gun. A programmer built a USB interface on the toy gun, which was connected to a JACE or PC. A Niagara driver was then written that could send commands to the device, making it rotate, target and fire tiny soft missiles. “It definitely made you look twice when you walked into the office,” Giorgis says.