Johnson Controls Offering New Wireless System

By Guy Boulton, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Oct. 17–CHICAGO — Eric Yablonka knows that the wireless world requires a mess of wiring.

Yablonka, the chief information officer for University of Chicago Hospitals, is responsible for ensuring that an array of wireless devices — cellular phones, personal digital assistants, two-way radios, pagers, laptop computers — stays connected.

It’s a long and growing list. And, up to now, each device required its own antennas and wiring.

Johnson Controls Inc. has a way to untangle that wireless welter.

The 120-year-old company is selling a technology that replaces the mishmash with one system that works with devices across the wireless spectrum.

University of Chicago Hospitals installed the technology in the building for Comer Children’s Hospital, which opened this year. It since has added the technology to its main hospital. And it plans to add the technology to an ambulatory clinic next.

“The technology sort of proved itself,” Yablonka says. “It’s part of our standard spec for new facilities.”

That’s Johnson Controls’ goal. The business is still in its early stages; about 40 systems have been installed worldwide. But the company envisions the technology’s eventually becoming commonplace in commercial buildings.

The technology also could become one of the largest sources of organic growth in the company’s building controls group, says Robert Grauman, director of the group’s wireless business unit.

Johnson Controls — which has thrived in businesses as diverse as automobile seats, batteries and building maintenance — licensed the technology from InnerWireless Inc., a private company in Richardson, Texas, in January 2004.

It also is an investor in the company.

Johnson Controls, the state’s largest company, doesn’t have exclusive rights to the technology. But with sales of about $28 billion in its fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, the company brings a global presence to the alliance.

The technology also fits nicely with the company’s business of building controls for heating, air conditioning, lighting, security and fire systems.

Those products, largely invisible to most people, are part of the modern infrastructure of commercial buildings. And more of those controls will be integrated wirelessly throughout a building or corporate campus.

“They have the relationships,” says John Novak, an analyst with Morningstar Inc. “And this is another product they can put before the customers.”

In addition, the technology plays to Johnson Controls’ strength in systems integration, such as enabling an alarm to be relayed to a cellular phone or a lighting control system to tie into the controls for a heating system.

“We really have people who make buildings work,” Grauman says.

Making buildings work increasingly means ensuring that all those cell phones, BlackBerrys, wireless laptop computers and other devices — the panoply of the modern corporate warrior — work throughout a building. As anyone who has tried to use a cell phone in an elevator knows, that isn’t done easily.

The InnerWireless technology simplifies the task.

The technology, “shared infrastructure,” enables a building to be wired with one system capable of working with almost any wireless device. The system also provides better coverage, capacity and, not the least, flexibility.

What that means is that the ceiling doesn’t have to be torn out every time a new wireless device comes along.

To show what the technology can do, Johnson Controls is focusing on buildings in which wireless devices abound and in which reliable connections can be critical: hospitals.

They are inherently mobile workplaces. Doctors and nurses don’t spend their days at a desk. Patients, too, often are moved throughout a hospital, transferred from an operating room to an intensive care unit, for instance, or from a room to a radiology suite for a test.

Equipment moves from room to room or floor to floor. The result is that hospital employees often don’t know where it is — and they rarely have time to look for it.

“Today, a lot of hospitals have more equipment than they need because they can’t find it,” says Hugh Hudson, director of business development for the wireless business unit.

That equipment now can be tagged using so-called RFID and RFLS technology to enable it to be located quickly. But that, too, requires a wireless technology.

Further, monitors now are increasingly wireless, quietly sending alerts to nurses. The goal is to do away with the alarms that made hospitals inherently noisy, and therefore stressful, places.

In short, Johnson Controls perceived that hospitals have the greatest need for the new technology, and that’s largely where the company has placed its focus.

“We are at the tipping point in health care,” Grauman says. “I think almost every hospital being built will consider shared infrastructure.”

Ted Hood, vice president of technology planning at Gene Burton & Associates, a health care communications and medical equipment consulting company in Franklin, Tenn., agrees.

“For health care, the technology is going to become more and more prevalent,” Hood says.

Still, the technology isn’t an easy sale.

For one thing, many people aren’t aware that the technology exists. For another, the information technology budget, particularly in hospitals, can be spread among different departments, and those departments often don’t give much thought to infrastructure for wireless devices.

The technology also has a high upfront cost: about $2 a square foot for hospitals. That means a system for a 500,000 square-foot-hospital will cost about $1 million.

Further, the idea that one system could work with nearly any wireless device invites some skepticism.

That was the initial response of Tony Rubino, who oversees strategy for information technology at University of Chicago Hospitals. But Rubino says, “They delivered exactly what they said they would deliver and, in many cases, over-delivered.”

For now, the technology has negligible effect on Johnson Controls’ sales. But the company clearly is working to position itself for what someday could be a fair-sized business and one of its core products.

“It’s sort of a little seed they are planting,” Novak says.

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