California-based building automation developer J2 Innovations has launched a new software platform for building automation and IoT applications, the company said in a realease.
The new software suite, dubbed FIN 5, provides monitoring, control, scheduling, alarming, visualization, integration, and analytics capabilities designed for OEM partners to customize and incorporate into their products or systems, the company said.
FIN Framework is already used by a variety of system manufacturers involved in BAS, HVAC, lighting, and shading control in buildings. J2 Innovations also highlighted that FIN 5 is designed to be open; supporting all the major protocol standards used in buildings today, to enable integration with multiple building systems and IoT deployments.
“Since the very beginning of J2 Innovations, we have set out to help evolve the industry by creating technology that covers the same bandwidth of functionality as traditional automation systems but is much simpler to engineer and operate, and is fully IoT compatible, said Jason Briggs, CEO, J2 Innovations
J2 Innovations said that the FIN 5 release includes many new features and additional benefits, including a new database, and system configuration UI, to enable faster engineering. A new template creation wizard also makes integrating controllers faster and easier, further reducing configuration time for systems integrators and OEMs, the company said. Also, J2 Innovations has added additional open APIs to help OEMs and developers further extend the framework, and has improved the connector framework to make it even more open for third party system and device integration.
Following J2 Innovations acquisition by Siemens last May, there is now a stronger emphasis on ensuring the FIN Framework follows latest standards in cyber security; security by design and regular penetration testing.
J2 Innovations is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Siemens, operating as an independent legal entity.
“Many of the quality assurance processes Siemens incorporates in their design and development are now fundamentally part of J2 Innovations’ new quality culture. I believe we’ve been able to strike a good balance between innovative and robust products,” said Alex Rohweder, COO, J2 Innovations
The company also said that FIN natively supports the Project Haystack open standard for defining and communicating building related data across multiple instances.
In addition to FIN 5, J2 Innovations is also announcing FIN Cloud, which will be released in the near future. FIN Cloud adds to FIN Framework support for secure remote connection via the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, simplifying remote connectivity for multi-site building operators. FIN Cloud provides OEM partners with support for SaaS architectures, using the Haystack open standard protocol over MQTT for the Edge to Cloud connectivity.