Company Profile

Sphere Systems Pty Ltd Sphere Systems Proprietary Limited was formed in 1986 by a group with wide experience in engineering, electronic measurements, hardware and software. Aims The company aims to meet the requirements for its products from Australian sources and to use local technology whenever possible. Sphere Systems Pty Ltd has a very active design and development team and believes that local equipment can compete successfully against foreign products. Our equipment is all designed and manufactured in Melbourne, Australia. Company Philosophy Sphere Systems is an engineering research and development company. It employs highly capable and experienced people to produce robust and reliable systems. These systems are designed so that they can be programmed and supported by both installers and end-users. The company believes that by staying close to the end-users that their feedback will enhance and improve the products.
Markets Sphere Systems' key market is Building Automation. This includes Direct Digital Control (DDC) Building Management Systems for control of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC), Lighting and Access Control. The flexibility of our products allow our systems to participate in the monitoring and control of other equipment installed in buildings such as freezers, refrigerators, cool rooms, computer rooms and other technical services.
History Sphere Systems was formed in 1986 by a group of engineers to build and market a low-cost Unix computer based on the National Semiconductor NS32000 chip set. The team ported Unix to this platform which was sold to value-added resellers for incorporation in computer controlled systems. The application of computers to building monitoring and control systems was just emerging and the team developed a controller for this market. The first was a Forth based system which was followed by a modular, object-oriented system which operated on a multi-drop RS485 network. A powerful user-friendly graphical frontend was designed and built to simplify the user interface with the system. A standard SQL database was used to ensure that all information in the system was accessible to users in a non-proprietary matter.
Having an innovative and sophisticated customer such as Austin Health led to the realisation that, with training, many customers will be able to program and manage their own systems. To facilitate this, the system was designed with in-built objects for all of the control operations required within a building system. End users were able to set properties of these objects and establish their required control without resorting to any form of programming language. These objects included powerful logical, timing and state machine functionality. In the mid-1990's Sphere introduced an access control product as a partner to the DDC product. This shares the same firmware and design philosophy and allows close integration between these two components on building management. The access control product has been installed at many sites including a prison and a state police headquarters. It has also been used as a tool for OH&S where staff must operate in hazardous areas and it is necessary to be able to track their location and movements. New communication technologies such as GSM, SMS, GPRS and CDMA allow access to the system and alarms to be delivered promptly on a global basis. Sphere Systems is a proud member of the Australia China Business Council and the Building Automation and Controls Contractors Association.