Higher Education

It’s important for educational institutions to stay connected across their campuses.

Without that connection, you might end up wasting time and resources, providing students and faculty with a lesser experience, or experiencing costly issues.

That’s where Blue Pillar comes in. We've been meeting connectivity needs for leading education institutions for over a decade. Many of these institutions began by focusing on one critical need, and later expanded into additional use cases to benefit their campuses.

While our clients have varying reasons for adopting Blue Pillar for their connectivity needs, the same technology is at the foundation of each application. Blue Pillar has optimized the software, hardware, installation, and configuration needed to achieve a price point that was not possible before: up to an 80% reduction in the total cost of deployment compared to industry norms.

Use Cases:

Energy Meter Connectivity
and Aggregation

Efficiently log historical data for electric and gas meters, and easily integrate to an open API for inclusion into various analytics and reporting solutions. Customers commonly use this data for demand charge reduction, usage baselining for measurement and verification of energy improvement initiatives, portfolio energy management reporting, and energy usage anomaly reporting and alerting.

Remote Facility Management

You can cost effectively connect to remote sites and buildings for remote monitoring, generator testing and compliance, energy alerts, HVAC setbacks, and environmental monitoring. Traditionally, a lack of affordable options has made it difficult to connect to these sites.

Sustainability Reporting & Energy Project Measurement & Verification

Collect and report on energy usage across the campus. Integrate with disparate power meters & metering systems to provide a single platform for sustainability and energy data.

Renewable Energy System Monitoring

Gain real time visibility into the renewable energy systems deployed across the campus. This includes Solar/PV, and battery storage systems.

Emergency/Backup Power Monitoring & Control

Blue Pillar provides real time visibility into the health, state, and readiness of a portfolio of backup power generators across a campus environment. Conduct automated testing and event management for generators, ATS’s, and switchgear. Reports are generated and stored to allow for electronic record keeping for local or state compliance requirements.

Water Meter Connectivity & Aggregation

Connect existing or new water meters for real-time monitoring and alarming, historical usage analysis, and integration via API to 3rd party analytics engines. Customers commonly use this data to avoid unnecessary waste and usage of water as well as reducing the operational expenses of manually collecting and analyzing the data itself.

Alternative data logger

Avoid paying for an expensive temporary data logger for load/energy studies. Blue Pillar’s solution is permanent and will cost a fraction of a 30 day temporary study.

System & Data Consolidation

Make the consolidation of equipment data easier for old and new equipment alike. Customers may have dozens of systems at each facility, and consolidating all of this information can be difficult, if not impossible. For customers that have standardized on a Microsoft Azure IoT strategy, Blue Pillar is an irreplaceable implementation engine for connecting these disparate systems to customer’s Azure IoT environments.  

Cloud based integration platform

Provide simple connectivity for important facilities via API to other IT systems such as Building Automation Systems (BAS), Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), and Enterprise Asset Management (EAM).

How we can help:

For the first time, we’ve made it fast and simple to manage equipment and systems. Blue Pillar has used our 15+ years of experience to learn how to connect industrial equipment to the internet and serve up the data to manage, monitor, and control equipment, all without requiring the same investment associated with SCADA and other technologies.

Now you can deploy and maintain connectivity to distributed, remote facilities, in addition to your main campus. Our one-of-a-kind approach uses our “context engine” and Azure IoT technology, but isn’t proprietary to any one equipment vendor, giving you the flexibility to use Blue Pillar for a single facility or system-wide, without locking into a single equipment centric vendor solution.

Platform Benefits

Capture Operational Savings

Provide a Better Campus Experience

Quick response times, emergency readiness, sustainable practices, and reduced energy costs all benefit both students and faculty. Create a better, safer campus by increasing connectivity across your facilities.

Reduce Operational Costs

Capture Operational Savings

Driving around to remote facilities to triage issues, conduct weekly inspections, and test emergency power systems is inefficient and often ineffective. Instead, Blue Pillar's Remote Facility solution reduces costs and increases efficiency. Facility personnel are empowered to make smart decisions and eliminate unnecessary operational waste.

Accelerate Access to Sustainability & Energy Data

Accelerate Access to Sustainability & Energy Data

Blue Pillar provides real time visibility to energy waste sooner than traditional methods of energy bill analysis. Catch areas of waste earlier and develop more accurate strategies to increase sustainability.

Avoid Vendor Lock in

Avoid Vendor Lock in

With Blue Pillar’s IIoT platform, a university can adopt a state of the art energy data platform without being locked into a single meter manufacturer's hardware, allowing the university to keep the specification for energy meter hardware open and competitive.