“We are not the community. We’re just members of it.” — Inside a leading mind behind Niagara 4

Inside a hot and humming mechanical room in Nashville, Tenn., John Sublett sat with a small team on overturned 5-gallon buckets, hunched over PCs. The group of young men at a startup called Tridium was brought in by the client to install a new web-based management system for an industrial chiller plant. The year was 1998.

“This plant had invested in our technology and frankly had a couple kids come in and install it,” said Sublett, who at the time was only 24 years old. The men were also software and networking people, not buildings people, but they were looking at buildings problems with an eye toward software technology.

“That’s why what we ended up creating was so different from the rest of the building automation industry. We were so thankful that the company took a chance on us in our early days.”

The software engineers flew back home to Richmond, Va. “And we sat down at our desks, opened our computers, and right in front of us we could see the chiller plant operating and many technologies coming together at once, very cool,” Sublett said.

Yet when the company started in 1996, just one year after the internet was commercialized, the vision of Tridium’s founders was to create a system with open connectivity that would let man talk to machine.

“We knew we were looking for an ecosystem business, but we didn’t realize how big and complex the ecosystem would end up being,” the 43-year-old Sublett recalled at the company’s world headquarters, situated on the third floor of an unassuming office building in suburban Richmond.

"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.”

Sublett and team quickly found that as a startup, they had capable people – but not enough of them if they were going to expand beyond building automation and other core markets. “As we started to solve some of the problems in various industries, we saw bigger problems in other industries and realized right away that we weren’t going to be able to do it all ourselves,” he said. “We realized we needed to do things differently.”

So in 2002, the Niagara Framework morphed into the more open Niagara AX, a complete redesign of the system, with open APIs for developers to create device-to-enterprise applications and internet-enabled products. The community that has emerged since has taken on a life of its own: more than 500,000 instances of Niagara run throughout the world, not only in building automation (Tridium’s largest market), but also in data centers, access control and security, aerospace, industrial controls and smart cities.

The evolution to Niagara 4 – and lessons learned

As mobile devices entered the world’s pockets, cloud computing emerged, and networks became more reliable and secure for carrying business-critical data, it was clear to Tridium that Niagara needed an upgrade bigger than a versioning update.

“I was a skeptic for a while on the cloud piece, because I wasn't sure that the reliability and security of networks would get to the level where you could take a system like [Niagara] and do important things in the cloud,” Sublett admitted. “I was wrong about that. The cloud is a reality, and cloud technologies that have been maturing over the last two or three years have completely changed the game in terms of time to market and the types of heavy lifting that you have to do to deploy an application or a service.”

With a vision toward an open web platform, Tridium engineers began with research, visiting more than 60 locations around the world to interview legacy and new customers to understand their needs and wants for a new application.

“The first thing we learned is what we are doing well, and one of our strengths is the unified toolset that we have,” he said. “We had to keep our deep and wide system architecture programmable, configurable, monitorable and maintainable through a consistent toolset. That's Niagara DNA. We heard loud and clear: ‘Maintain that ability.’”

Next gen – not only-gen

Tried-and-true Niagara AX isn’t going away anytime soon, and will be used by many in the community for years to come.

“As a software developer you always want to build something new, but in the real world you need to be sure that the systems and solutions that people have built, and the investments they have made, are maintained and carried forward,” Sublett said. “The newness and goodness of Niagara 4 came with the absolute requirement that we not abandon our existing installed base and customers who have been with us for years.”

When upgrading Niagara AX versions, for example, Tridium’s commitment to the community meant it wouldn’t destabilize core fundamental technologies within the architecture.

But while Niagara 4’s core foundational runtime, integration engine and control engine have all stayed the same and been seamlessly migrated from Niagara AX to Niagara 4, many components are fundamentally different.

“Many of the mobility and open web technologies reached the point where we could apply them to the good of the Niagara Community,” Sublett said. “Anywhere where there was a better option than what we invented ourselves, we un-invented those things and adopted new standards.”

The ‘Miracle of Tridium’: an empowered community

Sublett is proud of the code that powers Niagara. But he makes it clear that the true power and differentiator of the platform is its community.

“We are the stewards of that core technology, but we are not the community,” he says. “We’re just members of it.”

Sublett’s favorite piece of feedback he’s ever received from a Niagara Community member is that the Niagara Framework makes it so that the Niagara user can never say “No.”

“An integrator comes up to a challenge, a problem that a customer needs them to solve, and they can always do it with Niagara,” Sublett said. “There’s occasionally a question of expense and complexity, but it’s always possible. The answer is never ‘No.’”