Irish systems integrator McCool Controls & Engineering is working with French LPWAN provider Actility to deliver turnkey IoT services for smart buildings.

Through Actility’s subsidiary Abeeway, a provider of geolocation tracking products, McCool can support turnkey and tailored services based on LoRaWan technology.

McCool has been seeing a large demand for smart building technology as the nature of work changes. Customers require ways to manage their space, people and assets efficiently, precisely and safely. This partnership provides McCool with options for gathering and sharing precision data in a cost effective and reliable manner to feed into its overall smart building offering.

The products offer Open API connectivity that makes them suitable for smart buildings and Industry 4.0 markets.

Through this partnership, McCool intends to support companies as a system integrator, by offering them the opportunity to analyse and transform raw data into IoT insights to optimise any industrial processes through a flexible and scalable IoT platform offered by Actility.

Applicable to any enterprise IoT use case, Actility’s ThingPark platform lets users deploy, operate and maintain public and private wireless IoT networks.

Facilities management companies face growing pressure to improve their estate efficiency, ensure operational continuity, and integrate legacy buildings and their systems with facilities expansions. The IoT offers alternative mechanisms to make buildings more sustainable and productive. Simple, low-cost sensor devices can provide real-time contextualised data.

Actility and McCool enable building management companies to deliver various services using a common IoT enabler platform, providing LoRaWan server and software to manage public city-owned or private networks, under a unified, scalable, multipurpose IoT infrastructure.

LoRaWan is a low power wireless protocol for wide area networks. With LoRaWan, devices can communicate with IoT applications over long-range wireless connections. It also allows for devices’ batteries to last longer, therefore lowering costs.

“Leveraging a dedicated long-range low-power network for IoT, like LoRaWan, building management companies can connect countless battery powered things gathering data from sensors for temperature, humidity, CO₂, motion, door and window opening, parking occupancy, smart plugs, and so on,” said Nicolas Jordan, COO at Actility. “We are very pleased to work with McCool Controls to integrate our products into game-changing solutions and continue guaranteeing clients the maximum optimisation of their businesses.”

Actility already powers more than 50 telecoms operators with LoRaWan connectivity across the globe. Its enterprise-grade LoRaWan server – ThingPark Enterprise – operates over 35,000 network base stations worldwide. In additional to its international reach, Actility also brings to the partnership its Abeeway tracking devices that work indoors and outdoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, integrating low-power GPS, wifi sniffing and Bluetooth Low Energy.

“Actility innovative game changing IoT meets the growing demand of high-end customer centric solutions in the smart building industry,” said Shmuel Solomon, channel sales manager at Actility. “Together, we are ambitious to offer new generation wireless smart control systems, smart buildings and indoor and outdoor assets tracking in Ireland.”

Eoin McCool, COO at McCool, added: “With the Actility ThingPark and Abeeway end-to-end IoT, supported by Shmuel Solomon and his team, Actility meets all our requirements and we look forward with confidence with a partner that shares our vision of innovation-based excellence, partnership and customer service.”

McCool Controls & Engineering, established in 1991, is an master systems integrator with over 30 years of industry experience. It offer users in Ireland and across Europe turnkey smart buildings technology including geolocation services, RTLS, building management systems, HVAC controls, smart lighting, energy management systems, smart building apps, occupant room apps, indoor mapping, room and desk booking, cloud-based AI, data analytics, and systems integration. The company has seen growth in Ireland and Germany and has delivered many prestigious and large-scale projects in commercial real estate, medical, education, manufacturing, pharmaceutical, data centres and other industries.