Business View Magazine | February 2018

166 167 and 1970s. “Ken held many patents and built the company selling pneumatic controls to OEMs,” says KMC’s cur- rent CEO, Richard Newberry.“As time went on–and technologymoved along–the company continued to evolve, building a full line of HVAC products and services that included pneumatic and analog/elec- tronic controls and sensors.”Throughout the 1980s, these devices became increasingly popular, due to faster response time and higher precision than pneumatics. In response, KMC began manufacturing electronic sensors, variable air volume controllers, KMC CONTROLS It’s all about getting relevant data in real time to any device, via the cloud, so IoT is where we’re really focused, going forward. IoT is going to be four times as big as the industrial revolution; it’s going to generate untold trillions of dollars of GDP. RICHARD NEWBERRY CEO thermostats, actuators, valves, and other devices that operated from low-voltage DC analog signals. “After electronic, things became digital–digital controls for HVAC solutions now involved software, as well,”Newberry adds. In the 1990s,micropro- cessor-based, direct digital controls became the standard.These processed a variety of analog and binary inputs and outputs. KMC broadened its scope by developing digital controllers and software–its KMDigital line.“Now,with fancy graphical user interfaces, facilitymanagers could see all of their HVAC networks on a computer screen at their desk,” Newberry says. The industry continued to change rapidly.“Most companies started out with a proprietary protocol that was only used in their controls,”Newberry ex- plains.“But as the industry evolved, there became a demand for an open industry protocol. So, KMCwas one of the first companies to adopt BACnet.” BACnet is an acronym for Building Automation and Control Networks.The BACnet standard was developed by the American Society of Heating, Re- frigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers so that manufacturers could create interoperable systems of products that would allow for open communica- tion between all building automation and control systems, such as HVAC, lighting, access, and fire detection, as well as their associated equipment. It became an industry standard in the 1990s because of the desire for a non-proprietary or open protocol, and today almost all new buildings utilize BACnet. “KMCwas one of the first companies to adopt BAC- net in its purest form” says Newberry.“Our first line of BACnet controls came out in 2003.” Technology evolved again.“Digital transformation was happening,”Newberry says.“Mobile phones and the cloud allowed data to be on an offsite server versus on premise.As the Internet of Things became more prevalent, there was a greater demand for a mobile experience.”The Internet of Things, or IoT,