How Microsoft Quietly Built the City of the Future

Helping to modernize the world’s infrastructure has been a key focus for us at Microsoft. Whether it’s power & utilities, manufacturing or cities we are working to provide innovative solutions that look beyond the status quo and provide new thinking to help solve many of the world’s complex problems.

We like to practice what we preach here at Microsoft and a great example is the work that Darrell Smith, our director of facilities and energy, is doing to create a remarkable smart campus. Darrel assembled a small team of engineers that cast aside suggestions that we spend US$60 million to turn our 500-acre headquarters into a smart campus to achieve energy savings and other efficiency gains. Instead, he applied the “Internet of Things meets Big Data” approach to create a data-driven software solution that is slashing the cost of operating our campus of 125 buildings. The software, which is saving us millions of dollars, has been so successful that we and our partners are now helping building managers across the world deploy the same solution. With commercial buildings consuming an estimated 40 percent of the world’s total energy, the potential is huge.

It’s an amazing story that continues to unfold and definitely worth a read. Enjoy the full story here! – Jon C. Arnold