On this episode of the Futurum Tech Webcast – Interview Series, I am joined by Laura Laltrello, VP & GM, Services at Honeywell to dig into all the things in the world that are connected, that are driving intelligence, and some of these are things that you may not yet know about. We discuss the power of developing a seamless integration stack–integrating all industrial and information technology that exists into a building into one seamless integration stack. We also learn how Honeywell is helping their customers navigate their ESG goals, and hear more about the company’s work in developing smart cities and the technology needed to build them.
In our conversation, we discussed the following:
- What we mean by “intelligent world” and how infrastructure is connected
- How Honeywell is helping their customers navigate and achieve their ESG goals
- The ways that seamless integration can also improve security across operations
- How Honeywell technology is helping to develop smart cities, both within existing infrastructure and from the ground up
- The importance of having reliable and visible data integration to ensure the best outcomes for their customers
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Transcript:
Daniel Newman: Hello, welcome to Accelerate: Exploring Our Intelligent World. I’m Daniel Newman, principal analyst and founding partner at Futurum Research. Excited for this series where we are going to be digging into all the things in the world that are connected, that are driving intelligence, and some of these things are things that you may not know about. This first episode, joined by Laura Laltrello. Laura, welcome.
Laura Laltrello: Thank you, Daniel. Thank you for having me.
Daniel Newman: I’m very excited to have you here. This is something that is a passion for me. As we drive up and down roads, fly around the world, something I do, something I know you do, sometimes we look out the windows and we’re just passing by and we just don’t realize how much of all of the world, all the things, all this infrastructure is connected. Part of it’s because we’re looking down at our really intelligent, connected devices maybe too much these days, but part of it is that as we are evolving as a world, all these things, these buildings, these planes, these cars, these trains, these are systems that are connected. And I think sometimes we just look out there right on past it.
Laura Laltrello: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. What we do is connect the buildings together, connect all of the systems that you see as you’re driving down the road and you just think it’s steel and concrete. We take all of that information, connect it together so that your elevators and your air conditioning and your badge readers, all of it works simultaneously for the occupants.
Daniel Newman: All right. So much of this. I’m kind of skipping ahead, but hey, I’m excited. Laura, before I jump into the topic at hand today, let’s start off with a quick introduction to yourself. Tell me, tell everybody out there a little bit about yourself and your role at Honeywell.
Laura Laltrello: Thanks, Daniel. Yes, I am Laura Laltrello, and I run Honeywell Building Technologies’ Projects business. And what that means is we integrate all industrial and information technology that exists into a building into one seamless integration stack for our customers. And we do that based on the outcomes that they’re looking for.
Daniel Newman: Sounds like a massive job. As I sort of alluded to in the beginning about how we kind of look out at this great big world and all this intelligence, Honeywell’s one of these companies that’s really interesting to me as well because I think we look out into the world and people maybe have seen Honeywell for one particular thing or another. Maybe they’re familiar with the aerospace or the aviation business. Or maybe, again, in their homes or buildings, they’ve seen smarter, intelligent thermostats. But overall, Honeywell does so many things. So much. Kind of talk about just the big scope of Honeywell and then of course your work.
Laura Laltrello: Sure. So let’s talk a little bit about Honeywell Building Technologies because that’s the scope of work that I’m in. And we do a lot of things outside of Honeywell Building Technologies and aerospace where we put controls in planes and in process manufacturing technology where we look at critical infrastructure and put intelligence there. But in buildings, and one of the reasons I came to Honeywell, is a building– it’s kind of a giant computer, but it’s not really well connected. So we take sensors and controls and software and we integrate that information together to be able to have better outcomes like driving a more sustainable world or the safety and security of the building or the occupants or even the entity or even a healthier place to be in as an occupant.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I like the analogy. As an analyst in the tech industry, I often kind of associate intelligence to chips and smaller devices, and then of course we see how that scales up. And of course, chips feed systems that are in buildings. So that could be the elevators, that could be the HVAC system. That could be, of course the COVID pandemic brought a lot of attention to the air and the purification systems of HVAC and of course the health of the building and the ability for the occupants to be in a good situation when they enter a building. Dig into that analogy a little bit about the building is a computer. Why is it so important that the world starts to recognize that a building isn’t just bricks and cement and glass, but that it really is this intelligent infrastructure that is going to really enable the world to be so much more connected?
Laura Laltrello: I mean, first we spend 90% of our time indoors. I mean, it’s a staggering figure to me that 90% of our lives we spend indoors. And we’re spending it indoors in places that have control over your comfort, control over whether or not you’re safe and secure. And that infrastructure that we built to be able to stay indoors drives 37% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the world. So it’s driving a huge amount of pressure on our climate to get us safe and happy and comfortable. And if you can take all of the chips that are in a building, and if you think about it, there’s a chip in your fire panel, there’s a chip that runs the elevator, there’s a chip that runs in the controls for the air conditioning. There are chips in every part of the building.
And once you can connect those together, you can start making smarter decisions to make good trade offs between, “I want it to be cool in here, or I want it to not be cool because I need it to save energy and be more sustainable.” Those are the types of decisions our customers are facing right now that we’re helping them navigate through and put in technology to be able to solve.
Daniel Newman: So sustainability, instantly my antenna went up. I want to dig into that a little bit more because this is something that’s become… It’s kind of a combination. It’s a bit of a marchitecture. Over the past few years, a lot of companies have come out, sort of made pledges, made commitments. One of the things as an analyst that I always do is I always have a bit of a magnifying glass on things like, “Okay, I get it. You’re trying to relate, you’re trying to sell your business to the world and that you’re getting on board with important seculars like going green or being more sustainable.” Having said that though, this process is hard and it seems that Honeywell is putting a lot of energy and investment into this. How does Honeywell and all this technology that you’re talking about actually enable companies to be more green, be more sustainable?
Laura Laltrello: I mean, we could probably spend the next two hours talking about sustainability. I mean, you’re right. It’s a very hard topic to navigate. Our customers don’t even have the data yet to understand their carbon footprint. So they are trying to achieve these sustainability goals by 2030, 2035, 2040, and they guarantee and promise their shareholders and key stakeholders that they’re going to meet these goals, yet they’re not sure where to start. We have just released our carbonate energy management software, which is part of Honeywell Forge, that can help them identify what their carbon footprint is and what their energy consumption is in addition what the source of supply is so that they know that they’re getting clean energy from wind and solar versus maybe from a coal plant. And if not, then they can figure out how to do something about it.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. And as I see it, it feels to me like we’re still in a bit of this inflection point where companies, as I suggested, they’re all raising their hands saying, “Okay, here’s what we’re doing.” And I sometimes think, Laura, that it’s very easy for a company to be like, “Ah, we’re going to make a pledge for 2040.” And we got like, was it 18 years? 18 years to get there. But every day counts. This is one of those things where the decisions that these companies are making today. Because you can’t do all this stuff very… It’s not all overnight.
So you said that you lead projects for this. So I imagine that as you’ve traveled the world, Honeywell’s a global business, you’re starting to have the opportunities to engage with the customers, hear these challenges, see the stuff coming together. Are there any stories or customer examples that you feel like you could share?
Laura Laltrello: So many. So many. So let’s start on sustainability and then we’ll move to a few other stories. Just the schools that we see, the school systems we see in the United States, we’ve helped a lot of schools that are looking just to reduce the amount of energy that they use. And a lot of times we think of a school, we think of Smith Elementary School. But most of the school systems, they’re looking at LA County and where they’re looking at all of the schools under one big umbrella.
In the Middle East, we’re helping build cities where their goals are on the safety of their citizens, the security of the citizens and the sustainability to make sure that what they’re building and the footprint they’re building is going to last and not going to add harm to the world. The Middle East, one of the big things that they’re worried about is water because you’re sitting in the middle of the desert and you’ve got to figure out how in the world you get water to the people when you’re in a desert.
So we have a lot of different challenges that we see with our customers today. On the technology side, one of the more exciting projects we do is we work with Dubai Airport. So if you think about air traffic control in a runway where the planes are landing, you’ve got to get the planes to the gate, you’ve got to get the other planes off, every time that you miss that schedule, money is lost. And if you take too long to run down the runway, you are wasting fuel. So we help by putting a software stack in place that you can see everything that’s happening and direct to the gate to reduce the amount of fuel, to be able to guide the planes to be at the closest gate that is appropriate and to be able to navigate the airport. And it connects to the lights on the runway. So when the lights light up, it tells the plane where to follow so that they go to the right gate and then the air traffic control can see what’s happening on the ground and change the algorithm as they need to.
Daniel Newman: So you’re working with cities, you’re working with school systems, you’re working with airports and lots of different things. It sounds like you’re sort of trying to concurrently address several problems. Obviously each of them have a productivity and efficiency challenge, and that’s kind of target one. I think we spend a lot of time here on the sustainability thing, which I would kind of call an overlaying issue with every productivity challenge you have. Because you want to add to productivity, you want to create efficiency, but you gotta do it sustainably. So you mentioned things like reducing the amount of gas, which in a jumbo jet is a lot per second, it’s real dollars and real expenses.
And then of course, another area that I thought would be prudent for us to spend a little time on is security, because I always feel like we think of cyber security and breaches as data things, right?
Laura Laltrello: Yes.
Daniel Newman: So, if my social security, it got stolen, or somebody hacked into the company’s database and was able to steal customer information. These are real challenges. Don’t get me wrong. But in the operational technology world where you and your team spend a lot of time, there are physical issues that security can create. They can create physical harm and risk, right? Because an airplane is a computer, a vehicle is a computer, a building is a computer. You can start fires. You can have a piece of machinery and a factory go rogue and cause damage to goods or people. So there’s some real big risks here. So of course we want to be more productive and more efficient, of course we want to be more green, but what about being more secure?
Laura Laltrello: Oh, this is such a good point. We have a cybersecurity practice that helps our customers figure out how they can do audits and make sure that they’re more secure. But more than the problem of the fact that there are issues, there’s not even a recognition. In many cases, the computers that run the operational technology, they’re down level. So they’re certainly more vulnerable than the data center that’s running your email. So the data center running your email is less vulnerable than the data center that’s running your HVAC unit.
And we find viruses that sit in the computer chips of the operational technology equipment, and that can cause a serious threat. And if you think about the stakeholders in this scenario, IT is running IT. So it cares about security and they protect. Facilities care about keeping the building up and running. And facilities don’t run IT, nor do they even speak the language. So your facilities managers are running your operational technology, your CIO is running your information technology, but you need the practice of what’s happening in information technology to come over here to operational technology to be able to make that stack better and more secure and safer for the company. So it’s a hard problem to solve because you have multiple stakeholders with very different goals.
Daniel Newman: This is something I’ve spent a decent bit of time on. Our firm has done actual research on the IT/OT conundrum. We’ve looked at it. We certainly found even just as recently as a few years back that IT and OT absolutely do not communicate in a meaningful way.
Laura Laltrello: No.
Daniel Newman: Now, IT has shifted to OT with Edge in some of the Edge hardware, right? Because it’s basically moving servers, putting them in different environments than they’re typically put in. And sometimes they make them hardened for the Edge they’ll say, or they’re better in a hotter or less ideal environment. But still, the software that those tend to run are things like we mentioned, they are the factory machines, they are the HVAC systems and buildings. I guess I’m just trying to get there though is, so there’s been indications that that communication is getting better, but it sounds to me like what you’re actually seeing in the field is that this is still a really sizable problem. How do they solve it though? How does that facilities person responsible for technology coordinate security and how quickly are they able to move?
Laura Laltrello: I mean, the very first thing I would advise anyone to do is find a trusted advisor and get an audit of your operational technology. Find someone who has a cybersecurity practice and go get your operational technology audited. Because once you do that, you can at least start to see where you might have vulnerabilities and then you can start to put actions in place to go address them. In many cases, our customers aren’t even quite aware of where they might have vulnerabilities because it’s not the problem that the facilities management team worries about. They worry about up time, keeping the building running, keeping the elevators running, making sure things work. And when you’re trying to protect against risk, you’re doing things to slow things down a bit so that you can ensure the safety, which is a very different goal. So if you start by getting an audit and realize the exposure, then you can start to address it.
Daniel Newman: Yeah, I have to imagine all the buildings out there, all the plants and manufacturing, tons of risk currently that exists. Of course that’s an opportunity to stop, take a minute, get it fixed, compliant, put the right governance in place, make the investments. Gosh, the risk, Laura, is just too high to do anything else. And of course we’ve seen the grids get hacked over the last few years. We’ve seen the world’s largest public cloud providers have outages. We’ve seen whether those are done through malicious or they’re done just through the fact that technology and infrastructure isn’t flawless, it just never is. And so that’s a pretty significant challenge in this particular space.
So in terms of connecting it all, I guess I’m kind of interested here. So we kind of talked about things in isolation. You’ve got an airport that’s intelligent, you’ve got a building that’s intelligent. I feel like for a decade we’ve been talking about smart cities. Where do you see us with that evolution? Are we getting to a point? I mean, I just think about things like connected vehicles. Like autonomous vehicles are going to require a ton of integration, for instance, between a vehicle, the municipalities, the buildings, because you can’t park them, you can’t move them, you can’t keep them safe. But even just the buildings and stuff, are we getting to a point where we’re bringing the buildings? Are they going to start talking to each other? Is this going to come together?
Laura Laltrello: Oh, absolutely. So this is for the two of us that sit in the US. We have infrastructure that’s already built. It’s always hard to build on top of the infrastructure you have, especially when it’s already intelligent, it’s owned by different people. But in places like Egypt where we’re working with a city where they’re building a new Cairo and they’re building a city for 7 million people. They’re building it from the ground up to be smart, sustainable, safe, secure with all of these outcomes and it’s connecting together. And the work that we’re doing is integrating that technology so that you can see what’s happening from the lamppost to the police car to the hospital. And so all of those things work together.
In spaces where we’ve seen buildings go from ground up, we see that intelligence comes together much, much faster than when you’re trying to piece together components of a city that already exists. But we have other cases where we’re working on outcomes in cities. Like we’ve been working in India with Bangalore on building a safe city where we’re integrating the camera system so that they can respond to emergencies much faster and that they can keep their streets safe.
Daniel Newman: So you’ve got secure and you’ve got smart and it sounds like you’ve got brownfield and you’ve got greenfield.
Laura Laltrello: Yes.
Daniel Newman: I’m particularly curious about the brownfield. I just want to ask you to double click on that for a minute because I think that it’s kind of like when you build a software, if you’re building it from zero right now, you’re going to build it to be very cloud friendly, very mobile friendly, right?
Laura Laltrello: Yes.
Daniel Newman: The challenge is the building, like you said, most of them are already in place. Even in a growth city in America, here, most of the buildings are in place. Now you do this all over the world. If you think of any major city in Europe, most of their infrastructure is much older.
Laura Laltrello: Absolutely.
Daniel Newman: So getting to “smart,” is it possible? How big of a challenge is it for cities to be able to take advantage of these technologies to layer it in with knowing the constraints and the limitations that exist with current infrastructure?
Laura Laltrello: Yes. So let’s break it down and keep it simple as a US example. Today, if you look at the way our US cities run, forget the corporations, forget the residents that live in those cities. Just the emergency response. They don’t talk to each other. You have a 911 system that’s built on calling. How often do you pick up the phone and call someone? You don’t. You text them. You message them, but you don’t typically pick up the phone and call. So it’s starting with a very different process than what we’ve adopted today. And it doesn’t talk. The fire department and the police department and the hospital, they don’t necessarily talk to each other.
One of the things, just a small piece that we’re working on is we bought US Digital Designs and have integrated it into our portfolio. And what they do is they specialized in firehouses and in helping firefighters. So if you think about the life of a firefighter, when there’s a fire, everyone in the firehouse gets woken up and they get woken up suddenly. They work second and third shift for their entire lives, which it’s an absolute drain on your quality of life. What US Digital Designs does is, has a smarter way of waking up the firefighters and integrating the information they need so that it’s not just a radio dispatch. “Let me tell you this one time, it’s 715 Maple Street.” But it’s on the display and it’s on, its information that they see through the process of where they’re going. And then we’re integrating that into our technology that we have in the fire panels to be able to give them more information about what’s in the building.
So you might know that this is the building you go to, but when you get there you’re not sure what happens. And we are taking that one step further and looking at, “Well, is there anybody in the building? Where is the fire and what’s the best route to access it because we know the layout of the building?” So all of those things we can do to help integrate that part of the chain and then start connecting it to the other emergency response can at least help the safety and security of the city work much better.
Daniel Newman: Yeah. As I listen to you talk, it makes me realize that this is a really important and also a very sizable job that it’s going to take to connect this, because you’re basically saying even just the municipalities and the local governments don’t tend to have their systems all connected. So then when you start to think about traffic flow? What about, again, commerce? What about congestion? All these different things almost are on their own system. But as you see it, if you build it from zero, like you said, you mentioned the new Cairo, you can almost think about all these things now. If it’s using existing, you have to sort of look at this as, “Here’s application A. Here’s application B. Here’s application C. How do we tie A and B together? How do we tie B and C? How do we tie A and C?” It sounds like it’s going to be a somewhat lengthy process. But is it achievable?
Laura Laltrello: Oh, it’s achievable. I mean, we link things together today every day in the projects we do. We have a project in an airport where we linked the baggage handling to the security to immigration, to the screens. All of that data into one sack so the customer can see it. We do it for our companies that are looking at it from a building. We just have to then be able to link a citywide. I think the technology problem of linking the data is easier than the political problem of getting to the data from the key stakeholders that are in that environment.
Daniel Newman: Well, I hope they can find the luggage that never made it from LA to Sydney when I went… That was a long week. And by the way, the luggage didn’t only never make it, but it actually followed me around the world because I went from Australia to the Middle East to Europe. And instead of actually just sending it to my ultimate, the systems were so disjointed that they ended up sending it to each future location and then it finally found me at home like 30 days later.
Laura Laltrello: Do you have the little luggage device that lets you know where your luggage is?
Daniel Newman: I don’t.
Laura Laltrello: Okay.
Daniel Newman: But do you think that…
Laura Laltrello: Yeah, that’s too bad.
Daniel Newman: That’s an IoT thing, right?
Laura Laltrello: Yeah.
Daniel Newman: I can do that? Yeah, that sounds great. All right, so let’s kind of wrap up on sort of something that I think is important, and that’s data and measurement. So as we kind of talked about all these things, it really only works if there’s a platform, if there’s accessible data, if the data is able to be connected to all the systems and then being able to be viewed. How much time are you spending now in order to actually achieve these integrations and projects and outputs? How much focus is on the data, the compliance and the governance?
Laura Laltrello: Oh, a ton. We have two different systems that we use, different base platforms and Forge stocks on top of both that can integrate the data from the fire panel to the security cameras, to your HVAC and air conditioning unit, to your elevators so that you can see what’s happening in each of those threads and be able to make better outcome decisions on what you want each of those things to do. So integration of data is absolutely key. And it’s not just integration, but making sure that we get the right data and that you’re not just sending in junk because there’s a lot of data still out there. And in the IT world, there’s a lot of junk. And the same is true in the OT world, where you have a lot of data that’s unnecessary or the wrong data to give you the wrong signals that we work to vet out for our customers.
Daniel Newman: As I see it, I think that’s going to be the next frontier of opportunity, is that these buildings tend to tell a story and that story might be about being more sustainable. That might be a story about creating greater wellness and experiences for the employees. It might be a story about efficiency and productivity, which are kind of thematic in this. But companies invest in real estate because there’s an outcome in mind. The outcome tends to be it’s a place to work, it’s a place to do commerce, it’s a place to congregate, to learn, but the building story sometimes gets disjointed because these disparate systems are unable to kind of give that analytic, give that data, give that visibility. And so for you to be able to measure, you have to have the right data. For you to be able to be accountable, you have to have enough of the right data and the right systems.
So it sounds to me, Laura, like we’re getting there and it sounds to me like Honeywell, in these projects you’re doing, that the tools that are needed today exist. The challenge is obviously there are so many projects. And all of these, whether it’s a municipality or an enterprise or an airport or whomever you’re working with, each of them has a large challenge, a number of projects, and it’s kind of just figuring out which to do first.
Laura Laltrello: It is. We are sort of racing against the clock and we have issues on climate change and there is a clock on that. We have issues on the safety of our citizens and there’s certainly a clock on that. That we’re working on making sure that things are protected and safe through cyber security. So the challenges that we have in the building space are vast and fun and hard, and we have a limited amount of time to be able to reign it in to be able to protect the people.
Daniel Newman: Connected. Safe. Secure. Sounds like those are the items of focus in our intelligent world today.
Laura Laltrello: Absolutely.
Daniel Newman: Laura Laltrello, thanks so much for spending time with me here.
Laura Laltrello: Thank you, Daniel.
Daniel Newman: I really appreciate you joining me here on Accelerate: Exploring our Intelligent World.
Author Information
Daniel is the CEO of The Futurum Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise.
From the leading edge of AI to global technology policy, Daniel makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology investments. Daniel is a top 5 globally ranked industry analyst and his ideas are regularly cited or shared in television appearances by CNBC, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal and hundreds of other sites around the world.
A 7x Best-Selling Author including his most recent book “Human/Machine.” Daniel is also a Forbes and MarketWatch (Dow Jones) contributor.
An MBA and Former Graduate Adjunct Faculty, Daniel is an Austin Texas transplant after 40 years in Chicago. His speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.