Why Building Automation Needs a New Approach

We often examine the abstract, existential pressures of AI and climate change here on the Green New Perspective Podcast. But how do these challenges manifest in the real world? This episode, we’re joined by Robert Hemmerdinger, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Delta Controls. His role is to bridge that gap, showing how those macro forces are immediately impacting and reshaping the buildings and infrastructure we use every day.

Delta Controls deals in the complex digital plumbing that manages everything from HVAC to security in hospitals, data centres, and universities. This is an industry that started with a simple, transactional goal: energy conservation during the 70s fuel crisis. But as Robert explains, that mission has fundamentally evolved. He shares a story of how their technology is no longer just about optimizing a utility bill; it’s about using patented infrared sensors to ensure a surgeon isn't sweating onto a patient in a hyper-regulated operating theatre.

We discuss how this intensely engineering-driven sector is responding to the disruptive power of AI, not as a product feature, but as a solution to its most critical problem: the massive resource and labour shortage within the industry. Robert reveals their ambitious project, Building Canvas, which aims to cut engineering time by 50%, and how that kind of foundational innovation, creating a digital twin for free, is the future of making our world safer, smarter, and, crucially, more sustainable.

Interview with Robert

Dunya Jovanovic: Hi Robert, could you please introduce yourself and share how you came to lead the sales and marketing efforts in the intricate world of building automation?
Robert Hemmerdinger: I serve as the Chief Sales and Marketing Officer for Delta Controls. I’m now entering my 27th year in this sector, which I find pretty hard to believe. Like many, I didn’t choose a path to smart buildings and automation; I simply fell into it. I don't imagine many six-year-olds wake up dreaming of becoming a controls engineer! My career began immediately after school, when I spotted an advertisement for Andover Controls at its European headquarters in the UK. I began my career as a young engineer, progressing through technical support, training, project engineering, and ultimately into product management at Andover. When Schneider Electric acquired Andover, I helped manage its extensive product line and building automation from a product management perspective before transitioning into sales and establishing several teams. This journey eventually led me from the UK to the Boston area in the US. About eight years ago, thanks to the industry being very small and connected, I was fortunate enough to reconnect with former colleagues at Delta Controls and take on the leadership role for sales and marketing here.

DJ: For someone entirely new to Delta Controls, how would you succinctly describe what the company does?
RH: We specialise in building automation. The company has been in operation for approximately 40 years. Our entire operation is based in the Vancouver area, that's where the company was founded, but we are a global organisation. We distribute our products via a network of approximately 350 systems integrators worldwide. Until nine years ago, we were entirely independent, privately owned. Then we were acquired by Delta Electronics. Delta Electronics is a massive global manufacturer, primarily focused on electrical devices, with power systems being its biggest market. For example, a small power supply inside every iPhone sold is made by Delta Electronics, so you can imagine the sheer scale of their operation; it's a multi-billion-dollar entity based in Taiwan. Over the past few years, they've established a Smart Buildings Group, which includes us, along with a video surveillance company and various other building automation and lighting technologies. The Delta Controls segment—and yes, the shared name is a sheer coincidence that thankfully saved us on rebranding costs—comprises approximately 350 staff and 350 integrators globally. We specialize in smart building solutions and are recognized for our innovative approach. For instance, we played a significant role in creating BACnet, the open standard that enables building automation systems to communicate. I currently serve on the BACnet International Board of Directors, and many of us at Delta are actively involved in advancing open standards, interoperability, and communication within the industry. Our solutions include integrated lighting and access control products alongside our core building automation systems. This allows customers to manage a large portion, or even the entire building, from a single system front end. We were also the first to introduce BACnet Secure Connect, an encrypted communication method essential for the cybersecurity world we live in, and the first to market with a genuine Software as a Service (SaaS) building management system, a genuine cloud platform. We have brilliant people in Vancouver developing this cool technology, and I simply get the easy job of travelling the world to talk about it.

DJ: That helps paint a picture. Could you simplify Delta’s offering and explain the specific, day-to-day problems you help your customers solve?
RH: Our typical clients are diverse: large commercial office buildings, universities, airports, data centres, healthcare facilities, stadiums, and K-12 schools. Primarily, our building management system governs the HVAC equipment. We control heating, lighting, air conditioning, ventilation, access control, security, and CCTV systems. The specific needs vary greatly by application. For example, a hospital's requirements differ vastly from those of a university. In a hospital, the focus is on maintaining a safe and correct patient environment. They have strict regulations governing temperature and humidity, as well as the number of air changes required in a space, and we control all of that. We manage the mechanical systems that deliver air, heat, water, and cooling to these spaces with our control system. In healthcare, we enable providers to balance compliance with stringent regulations while keeping energy consumption and costs as low as possible. We also assist with sustainability and ESG goals.

Beyond core automation, we help solve other problems, too, such as asset tagging in hospitals, where equipment like crash carts often goes missing. We integrate with real-time location systems. This even includes what used to be called ‘baby tagging,’ where a newborn has a tag placed on them so we know their location, and an alarm triggers if they move somewhere they shouldn't—a crucial security measure. Our systems are a platform, a highly flexible toolkit, that provides our immediate customers, who are very smart systems integrators, with the tools to create their own solutions. They often come up with ideas we wouldn't have conceived in a million years. It's like Microsoft Excel; Microsoft makes the software, and users worldwide create impressive, complex spreadsheets and formulas that are truly remarkable. Our platform operates in a similar manner, specifically in the smart building space.

DJ: Delta Controls is a 40-year-old company with a long history. How has your role evolved as the market has shifted towards major trends like AI, data, and connectivity?
RH: It’s fascinating. A few years ago, I had a realisation that digitalisation is a continuous process, not a final destination. When I joined this industry 27 years ago, there was a major push for the "paperless office." Email was taking off, faxes were still around, and we used memos. We felt incredibly digital and connected then. Now, we're witnessing the same transformative evolution with AI, and I imagine we'll look back in five years and think we knew nothing compared to what AI will be capable of then. Our industry was born out of the need for energy conservation following the 1970s energy crisis. Before that, buildings were simply left running—fully heated or cooled with lights on—and the adoption of digital electronics enabled this entire industry. We’ve always been about saving energy, but over time, we’ve pivoted to solving a much wider range of customer problems. I can give you a prime example from healthcare. An integrator in the Pacific Northwest of the US had a hospital with a huge problem in an operating theatre. The surgical team was frustrated because the thermostat was set to 69 degrees, but the room was so hot that the surgeon was sweating onto the patient. That is a terrible situation for both staff and the patient. It was pushing the room outside the compliant regulatory tolerance. It even reached the point where the surgical glue used to close the patient was spoiling due to the heat. The team would attempt to cool the room by adjusting the set point. Still, the system would overcompensate, resulting in an excessively cold environment, which is detrimental to both the team and the patient. This problem stemmed from the fact that the thermostat was located far from the patient in these large operating theatres.

The cooling system uses a large ceiling diffuser to create an air curtain over the patient. Our integrator conducted a thermodynamic study using thermal cameras to analyze airflow and temperature distribution. The solution was our O3 sensor hub, which is installed on the ceiling. We removed all the bits of plastic usually stuck to the wall—such as temperature, humidity, and light sensors—and placed them on the ceiling. Crucially, the O3 sensor doesn't just measure the ceiling temperature; it utilizes infrared technology to measure the temperature throughout the entire space. We calibrated it to measure the temperature precisely where the patient was lying on the operating table. This unique, patented technology is used in various segments. In this specific operating theatre, we were able to measure the exact temperature at the patient's location and feed that data back to the system. Within days, we eliminated the problem of 'hunting'—where the room constantly cycles between hot and cold— bringing the temperature back into a stable, tolerable range. This resulted in happier staff, a safer environment for the patient, and restored compliance. This shift—where our technology helps patients have a safer surgical experience—is what's changed. Thirty years ago, when I started, that was not a conversation we would have had. We now focus on truly understanding our customers' pain points, their business goals, and their priorities, and then applying our solution to help them. Frankly, it makes for a much more engaging conversation.

DJ: Who knew the world of building automation held so much drama! Selling complex systems, such as HVAC controls, is no easy task. What would you highlight as the most significant sales and marketing challenges in this industry today?
RH: Our biggest challenge is effectively communicating that value and walking someone through a compelling use case. As I mentioned, we provide a toolkit, and how that is applied is truly up to our integrators and the community we serve. It’s difficult to share every success story because many of our projects involve sensitive, often secret, government buildings. We also have very private customers, particularly in the booming data centre market. We've seen a 30-40% increase in data centre sales this year alone, initially driven by the shift to working from home and now overwhelmingly by the growing demand for AI. This growth shows no signs of slowing. We do incredible work in that space, but we are often bound by NDAs or the customer's IP, which is a bit disappointing for marketing. Therefore, the central challenge remains conveying that value to customers and equipping the sales force to conduct consultative, rather than transactional, conversations. It’s about spending time with them, understanding their pain points, and figuring out the impact on their business. This requires taking an altruistic, engineering-first perspective: What is the best solution, even if it’s not ours.

DJ: How do you achieve a balance between simply educating your audience and actively selling to them?
RH: We spend more time educating than selling. This is because of the nature of our relationships with our systems integrators. Some have been with us for 40 years, while many have relationships spanning over 20 years. We operate in a highly symbiotic relationship: our success is intrinsically tied to theirs, and vice versa, because they essentially build their entire business around our solution, adding their "secret sauce" to take it to market. We genuinely listen to them. Whenever we start a new development project, we involve our customers at various stages. We invite feedback at the very early vision stage, and as we progress, we stop to show them the developments, welcoming their ideas and suggestions to steer the product. They are also involved in beta testing, trying the product, and providing feedback to iron out early bugs. Beyond the product level, we have advisory boards worldwide. Quarterly, we bring together trusted members of our customer base. We share internal information—our revenue, profit, strategies, and pain points—and they act as an external advisory board, or a de facto board of directors, helping us steer the organisation. These individuals are CEOs or presidents in their own right who take the time to offer us advice. This process fosters a strong, educational relationship with our customers.

DJ: Following up on relationship building: How have you and your team approached nurturing those relationships in a sector historically driven by engineering rather than marketing?
RH: Those long-term relationships are the foundation of everything. The 20-plus years of partnership with most customers have provided us with a strong foundation in engineering excellence. This excellence often resides within our customers' organisations. That solid foundation provides us with the necessary cushion to engage in a broader marketing or commercial conversation with the outside world, rather than relying solely on reciting technical specifications, features, and benefits.

DJ: Do you feel like that situation is now changing?
RH: I believe AI is poised to change everything in ways we can’t yet imagine. We can't keep up with it, so it's about choosing where to focus our efforts. Our primary focus is on helping our customers maximize their current resources. I see AI as a blessing, not a curse, for our industry. When I speak to any of our 350-plus systems integrators globally, they all report having ample work, revenue, and new opportunities. Their problem is execution—a shortage of engineering staff, project managers, developers, and graphics creators—the people who transact the data, using my Excel analogy. Given this talent resource problem, AI arrives at the perfect moment to help us address it. At Delta, we are working hard to develop tools that make our integrators much more efficient. A month ago, we soft-launched a product called Building Canvas at our global conference. We plan to enter beta testing at the end of this year and move to general public release in early 2026. Our ambitious and achievable goal with Building Canvas is to reduce our integrators’ engineering time by 50%. This means they can complete twice as much work with the same resources.

DJ: And what kind of initial reactions have you received to that goal?
RH: They’ve been fantastic. Amazon AWS, one of our business partners on this project, attended our conference, and the roughly 400 attendees received the message well. They understand and are very much looking forward to it. Of course, they are engineers, so they want the proof; they want to get their hands on it and test it before they truly believe. But they fully grasp the direction we are taking. What sets us apart is that our competitors apply AI to the finished product, whereas we embed AI into the system's creation. When you introduce AI at that foundational level, you automatically build a digital twin of the building. Digital twins have long been discussed, and a familiar example is Google Maps. Google Maps is a virtual representation of the real world that overlays real-time information, like traffic. While the concept has existed in the building market, creating one for an existing structure has been expensive, and we haven’t always known what to do with it. Our solution focuses on the creation phase: we use AI to significantly reduce the time required for creation, so the digital twin is essentially provided for free. It auto-generates a unique digital twin at the point of creation; I haven’t seen anyone else do that.

DJ: You mentioned helping clients with their sustainability goals. How do you see sustainability and innovative technology intersecting, particularly with the use of AI, which, while helpful, can be resource-intensive itself?
RH: That’s a valid point on AI sustainability. Many intelligent people believe that AI will ultimately solve its own sustainability issues. The consensus is that AI will eventually become far more sustainable and energy-efficient; it just needs more time to learn. Regarding our customers’ goals, every single one of them has targets, whether it’s aiming for a LEED Platinum rating, Net Zero status, or complying with corporate ESG mandates. The real hurdle, once again, is time and resources. They often lack the budget, the people, or both, to action their plans. Many already know what needs to be done, or at least they know which tools and programs they need to implement to achieve this. This is exactly where AI will be most helpful—addressing the resource shortage. AI is a valuable extra tool to consider. They can deploy it to assess whether it reduces energy consumption or to identify new ways to be more sustainable, such as by identifying a new energy source or reducing carbon emissions. I don't believe it's ready to be rolled out with a simple switch, but it is certainly moving in that direction.

DJ: What trends in the building automation or energy management space are you watching most closely right now?

RH: I'm tracking three major trends that I find most compelling.

Cybersecurity Modernization: Cybersecurity is a constant and growing concern. The majority of buildings worldwide are 20 to 30 years old, meaning they contain outdated, vulnerable technology. Upgrading these buildings to modern cybersecurity standards is a critical priority. We're already seeing critical infrastructure, such as data centres and airports, being targeted by malicious actors. Even a K-12 school being taken offline would cause massive community disruption.
Open Programming: Currently, we have open standards for how different technologies communicate and share data, but the actual programming code remains proprietary to each manufacturer—their "little secret sauce." I believe this will change soon, moving towards an open marketplace. This will mirror the IT world, where you can buy a laptop and run various applications from different companies. It will create a more open IT environment for buildings.
Data Centres: This is a fascinating space right now. They are undergoing a technological shift toward liquid cooling and "chip to grid" technology. The insatiable growth driven by AI continues without pause.

DJ: For other marketing or sales leaders in technical industries, what is the single most important lesson you’ve learned about connecting with a complex, engineering-focused audience?
RH Always, always bring the conversation back to customer value. As engineers, we all adore the technology—the cool gadgets, the wizards, the systems we create. But if you’re not delivering customer value, what is the point? To illustrate that value, I go back to the hospital example: it wasn't just about our sensor being a clever piece of tech; it was about ensuring the correct temperature for the patient, which translated into a safer medical procedure for the operating team and a better outcome for the patient, who didn't even know it was happening. That is the real customer value you need to communicate.

DJ: Looking ahead for Delta Controls, what are you personally most excited about?
RH: Undoubtedly, our new AI platform, Building Canvas. Reducing engineering time by 50% is genuinely revolutionary; it could fundamentally change our industry. It's rare in our business to have something that is such a real game-changer. That is the most exciting prospect for us over the next 12 to 18 months.