Navigant Research recently released its Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS) leaderboard, which provides an objective evaluation of intelligent building solution providers that are active in the global marketplace. Given how competitive the intelligent buildings market is, it’s an honor to be among the select 15 companies reviewed for the report. It’s an even greater honor to have ranked sixth.

This extensive report, developed using Navigant’s proprietary Leaderboard methodology, assesses a number of variables, including production strategy, technology, geographic research, sales, product quality, product portfolio, pricing, and staying power among other factors. As such, it takes a great deal of effort and excellence to not only be included on, but also move around this chart.

Although not technically one of the two “Leaders” (yet), every company ahead of BuildingIQ is a multi-billion dollar and multi-national corporation with a lengthy, in some cases century-long, history that provides extensive building automation system hardware and software. Their rich pasts have enabled them to become household names and amass an extensive stock of clients. BuildingIQ’s placement on the chart among these giants, as a young company founded just seven years ago, validates our drive, long-term vision, and winning strategy. It’s a true tribute to the hard work of each and every member of our young company.

As stated by Navigant, a BEMS is the cornerstone of any intelligent building. As such, it must be able to adapt to the growing complexity of the market and the ever-expanding number of inputs being factored into the decisions of facilities staff. Just like our platform, one of BuildingIQ’s strengths as a company is its ability to adjust for these changing conditions. Our recently unveiled 5i platform and technology-enabled services are a testament to this. Our team has worked tirelessly over the past year to make it a reality and continues its hard work today to ensure that our technology is prepared to leverage the various industry trends impacting the market, and even disrupt them.

Among these market shifts, is the growing complexity of building management systems (BMS). As the leading BMS-agnostic energy management system (EMS), BuildingIQ is in a unique position among Navigant’s leaderboard. The 5i platform and services are meant to augment the role of building managers, and equip them with the tools and guidance to be as effective as possible. By pulling data from the BMS system, BuildingIQ is able to supply actionable information to building managers. This reduces the complexity of their interactions with the BMS system and the demand on the facilities staff overall.

In addition to BMS complexity, tenant sophistication has also increased. Energy savings are expected, but comfort has emerged as a significant driver from the adoption of energy management systems. It would be a mistake to view energy savings and tenant comfort as an either/or decision. The thermal models that BuildingIQ creates for a building have always been optimized for tenant comfort as well as maximum savings and, with the recent acquisition of CSIRO’s ComfortSENSE technology, we are in a position to further fine-tune these capabilities by collecting comfort data directly from tenants.

What sets us apart from our competitors, as evidenced above, is our investment in the human element, which we have incorporated and continue to incorporate into our 5i platform-enabled services. The expertise of a building’s facility staff cannot go dismissed. This is why we’ve turned to augmenting the role of the facilities staff, while many companies are focused solely on automating it. By combining valuable, on-the-ground knowledge with BuildingIQ’s remote team of data scientists, building engineers, and operating staff, we’re able to uncover anomalies that would otherwise go unnoticed. Overlaying this with direct feedback from tenants ensures that all parties are creating the most comfortable and energy efficient environment possible.

Looking ahead, we’re sure to see even more changes within the market from the widespread implementation of new technologies, like solar and storage, to the passing of more clean energy legislation and an even greater emphasis on measuring and verifying energy usage (which we discussed in a previous blog post). We’ve very excited about the direction of this industry and are now more confident than ever in our ability to shape its future.