Page 12 - RC14-EDGE-Spring Issue-1Z

One of the things that attracted me to the role was it report-
ed directly to the CEO; I had always reported up into finance.
This reporting structure spoke of the importance they placed
on technology as part of or enabling their strategic goals. This
was also new thinking for them; my predecessor had reported
into finance.
My roadmap was approved immediately. Since then we’ve
completed several key augmentation projects to various back
office systems. We’ve also improved the availability of data
through the implementation of a data warehouse. With a
technology partner, we created a lease abstraction engine that
can automatically infer the meaning of lease clauses. But the
biggest project was moving our entire data center to the cloud.
This positioned us to restructure support and management
of all the various servers and applications that used to run the
business on premises, things like our exchange server, file and
print servers, MRI ( ERP), CRM etc., Now, instead of buying serv-
ers, we buy computing power as required in monthly, daily or
hourly increments. We are able to ramp up on particular points
in a quarter when we’re doing reporting, then as that compute
requirement goes down, we ramp it down. This allowed us to
reduce costs associated with capital provisioning, managing
and running our own network and server environment. It’s
really nice not having to worry about keeping up with the latest
and greatest server technology; I just manage the compute to
our SLA (Service Level Agreement).
JENEsys®
Building Operation & Information Platform
Manage and operate your facilities smarter, safer,
more efficiently and at peak performance levels.
10 Realcomm
My original mandate was purely the corporate IT compo-
nent of things; the back office stuff. That expanded to cover
all of technology, which includes the technology within our
buildings as well. If it’s IP enabled, it falls under my mandate. On
the horizon I see our emphasis being on the Internet of Things
(IoT), or as Realcomm has coined, the BUILDING Internet of
Things (BIoTTM); implementing smart building systems that will
improve the operations and efficiency of the 140 buildings in
our portfolio.
Realcomm: How has the Cloud, BYOD and the Internet of Things
(IoT) impacted your original strategy?
Segal: The strategy of delivering actionable information to users in
a convenient format has not changed at all. For Boxer, cloud, mo-
bility, and IoT represent more tactical opportunities to continually
improve our systems. Mobility is a great example. Since we had
already developed some sophistication with respect to working
with enterprise data, repackaging that information for a mobile
platform was a relatively straightforward process. We deployed
smartphones to everyone in our company, and tablets to those
involved in certain activities, like managers, leasing agents, and
quality inspectors. We have also redesigned applications using
responsive frameworks, basically taking existing information and
systems and changing the presentation layer. While these itera-
tions do not change the basic strategy, they are game-changers
for user experience.
www.lynxspring.com