Capitalizing on Data for Intelligent Buildings Market Expansion

The intelligent buildings market continues to evolve, and an increasing focus on the value of data opens the door to inventive offerings that speak to critical pain points for commercial customers within the market. Energy efficiency remains an important value proposition for intelligent building solutions, but cost savings associated with utility bills is an insufficient driver for market transformation in facilities management. The push toward the Internet of Things (IoT) as the framework for digital transformation of commercial buildings and the next iteration of the intelligent building capitalizes on the multitude of nonenergy benefits derived from facility data. The next frontier is moving from energy efficiency to energy optimization and from data-driven improvements to the occupant experience.

Smarter Interactions with Energy

Building-to-Grid Integration, a Guidehouse Insights report, presents big picture energy opportunities for intelligent buildings. Data, and the insights derived from it through analytics, elevate business opportunities for managing energy in commercial and industrial (C&I) buildings. A growing number of intelligent building solutions utilize data to direct an orchestration of systems to optimize energy use—the focus is on advancement and a more sophisticated use of technologies than simply using data to create dashboards that report on system performance.

Building-to-grid (B2G) is an emerging construct that creates an opportunity to generate new value streams with energy services as a foundation. The B2G platform is the framework for transactions around the energy supply and demand associated with the facilities and distributed energy resources of C&I sites. The bundling of advisory services, data communications, controls, and analytics will likely be the foundation of B2G solutions that enable the aggregation and coordination of C&I facilities to meet specific economic and corporate objectives. These objectives include power reliability, sustainability, and revenue growth.

Fundamental Shift in Enhancing the Occupant Experience

The Intelligent Building Technologies for Value-Added Services report from Guidehouse Insights explores how utilities can leverage IoT as a platform for new offerings to improve customer engagement and satisfaction. The benefit of the focus on data creation and analysis showcases the many nonenergy benefits that align with shifting customer expectations around technology. The number of commercial customers already investing in IoT solutions should result in changes to the consumption and demand patterns utilities use for resource planning. Furthermore, rapid growth in IoT for intelligent buildings market represents a significant revenue opportunity for new offerings. At the same time, it represents a threat to existing revenue streams for traditional electric services as these technology-enabled customers reshape how their building operations and energy consumption align.

IoT value-added services can be designed around financial incentives and expert advisory that builds off the existing core capabilities of C&I demand-side management programs. IoT intelligent building advisory offerings can leverage existing core domain expertise around energy efficiency and domain management, but would be amplified by partnerships with IoT players currently in the market.

These new Guidehouse Insights reports underscore the expansive opportunities associated with intelligent building data. Early solution provider adopters will need to develop strategic partnerships and revisit branding and positioning, but the upside to these challenges will far outweigh the costs.