Founder Note

This session explores how adopting an IT mindset for OT systems can enhance governance and cybersecurity, ensuring that digital buildings are not only smart but also secure and reliable. This session covers the following briefings:

The industry needed a different type of conference, so we built it. NexusCon 2024 was full of sponsor-free content, real-world case studies, and most importantly, our community.

Although nothing beats the in-person real-time learnings from NexusCon, we are excited to release the NexusCon session recordings to our Nexus Pro Community. We have over 40 hours of hot takes, knowledge bombs, case studies, collaborations, and disagreements among smart buildings industry experts to share with you.

As we approach the end of 2024, we’ve seen tremendous growth in our community this year. With the launch of NexusCon, The Nexus Marketplace, and all of the sharing and circulation of our content (thanks to many of you!), there are a lot more people on this email list today than there were on January 1, 2024.

Over a year has passed since our podcast with Cory Clarke, CPO of Neeve on Neeve’s full-stack offering. A lot has changed and progressed since then, including upgraded product offerings, a new company name, and $15 million in 2024 financing! We sat down with Nitesh Trikha, CEO of Neeve, to hear what’s new.

We just launched the NexusCon 2025 website and released 75 early bird tickets. This is the lowest price they’ll ever be, so leverage what’s left of that budget and get in on those early bird prizes (more on that below)! 

For our first Category Roundup, we focused the conversation on Maintenance Management (CMMS) and Digital Asset Registers. We heard from dozens of building owners at NexusCon who were interested in purchasing these technologies to support their operational efficiency

Episode 169 is a conversation with John Coster from T-Mobile and Mark Chung from Verdigris.

When Harris Capital sought to make Gate 8, a new home to the Harris family office, they made an intentional investment in smart building technologies with confidence that they would see a return in the form of satisfied occupants and seamless operation.

As part of our recent mini-series on the ways that both buyers and vendors in the smart buildings industry self-sabotage projects and hold us back from new tech adoption, we asked you, our community, to chime in with your own terms. And chime in you did!

For our first Nexus Pro Gathering since NexusCon, we were excited to welcome Christopher Tjiattas, Program Manager at District Control Systems, back to the (virtual) stage to once again give his award-winning case study presentation. 

In this case study, we sat down with Laura Towsley of RYCOM and Leon Wurfel of Bueno to hear the story of using data-driven tools, like FDD, to guide a smart building service provider through the Digital Revolution, leading to more efficient and valuable services to their customers.

As a vendor, there’s nothing more spooky than wasting time trying to support a buyer who can’t get out of their own way. Despite hours of discovery to understand their

Have you ever heard someone mutter “...and we can put a man on the moon” under their breath? It’s a great way to express the frustration of seeing incredible technological advancements all around us (like the moon landings) yet being stifled by archaic syste

A few weeks ago, there were two conferences in Denver for people who feel misunderstood. One was for people who believe aliens live amongst us. The other was NexusCon, for people who feel like aliens amongst the rest of the real estate and construction industries.

We recently performed one of our free vendor selection services for a pair of property development companies looking to find the latest in the access controls category for multifamily properties. For those of you who have been following along with our most recent whitepaper, Navigating the Marketplace,

We’re live at NexusCon, where we have 45 exhibitors. And guess what? We’re one of them.

The Nexus Marketplace started two years ago as a big ass spreadsheet. We began organizing technology companies into a huge database to sort through everything we knew about them. One of the first things we realized is how difficult it can be to tell what a company actually sells or does. Along the way, we began manually helping buyers with

This year, our team at Nexus Labs has worked harder than at any other time in our careers to make NexusCon happen. We started out scared, and spent

Episode 168 is a conversation with Lewis Martin from LMC, Lawrence Trifiletti from LONG, and Nicholas Gayeski from Clockworks.

When we started organizing NexusCon (now less than three weeks away!), we spent about a week looking for keynote speakers. It wasn’t hard to come up with a list

This week, we wanted to introduce some of the other unique spaces and events happening at NexusCon, like our Buyer & Vendor Symposiums and the Demo Stage.

Episode 167 is a conversation with George Garth from Harris Capital, Justin Anders from COMMSecurity, and Matthew Taylor from NDY.

This week, we thought we’d highlight the buyers — and sessions of interest — for three other industries that each face unique and difficult challenges when it comes

Hey Friends, For years we've gathered the biggest changemakers in smart buildings online (mainly, through this newsletter), and if you’ve been paying attention

Hey Friends, Here are some hot takes on MSIs and integration technology we’ve been hearing from the community, which will be hashed out

Hey friends, By the end of this week, we’ll be 50 days from the first inaugural NexusCon, but who’s counting? These last couple of weeks have witnessed what we refer to as the “conference

Nexus Labs is thrilled to announce our partnership with Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2), co-administered by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to accelerate the transition to digitized and decarbonized buildings.

Hey Friends, James is out this week, celebrating his birthday and his love for the outdoors in an undisclosed location deep within the Rocky Mountains…In the meantime, we thought we would share

Episode 166 is a conversation with Laura Towsley from RYCOM and Leon Wurfel from Bueno.

We had Knudson and Schoenfield dive into the technical considerations that have made EMS 2.5 successful thus far.

Episode 165 is a conversation with Drew DePriest from McKesson and Charles Blaschke from NorthPoint Development.

We sat down with Ben Cooper, Director of Property Technology at BGO, to learn more about how BGO has become a leader in cybersecurity for commercial real estate.

Hey Friends, Two weeks ago, we shared a review of the last year of Nexus Pro SME Workshops. In addition to the SME Workshops, the Nexus Pro community also meets monthly for

Hey friends, Over the past month, we've been supporting a large commercial real estate owner in a vendor shortlisting for Space Utilization solutions. With multiple tenants renewing leases, ending leases, and changing space requirements, it's a full-time job for a real estate owner to forecast the future demands of their tenants and optimize usage.

Episode 164 is a conversation with Jason Pohl from Buildings IOT from and Steve Watson from The Museum of London.

In early 2024, Atrius joined Nexus Labs on the panel for the Buyer’s Guide to Energy Management, ESG Reporting, and Carbon Accounting, where they showcased their application layer solutions. Today, we sat down with Simran Kalir, Director of Marketing at Atrius, to find out what they’ve accomplished and where they’re heading.

Hey friends, One of the myriad ways Nexus Labs accelerates technology adoption is through our Subject Matter Expert (SME) Workshops. We host these live and recorded SME Workshops once

Hey Friends, We sit 112 days from the first annual NexusCon, but who’s counting? I can confidently tell you that the Nexus Labs team is counting down the days. We’ve been

Hey friends, Have you listened to our latest podcast? It’s the first episode in a new series we’re creating called Buyer Roundups. Within Buyer Roundups, we “round up” buyers of smart building technology from a specific building-vertical type and ask them to share their experiences.

Episode 163 is a conversation with Gerry Hamilton from Stanford University, Dan Quigley from Boston University, and Durga Sarilla from Kansas State University.

Back in 2021, ACE IoT Solutions’ co-founder Andrew Rodgers sat down with us in a podcast to chat about what open source really means and the vision ACE IoT had for the future of open source. They’ve been hard at work for three years in bringing that vision to life. Today, we sat down with the other co-founder, Bill Maguire, to get a pulse on what’s occurred in the last year.

Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace.

Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace.

Episode 162 features Ryan Knudson from Macerich and Jon Schoenfeld from Buildings IOT. This conversation explores how Macerich has incorporated Buildings IOT technology into their shopping centers. Enjoy!

Did you miss our May Subject Matter Expert workshop? Catch the replay here!

It seems like just yesterday we were sitting down with industry experts like Shaun Cooley, CEO of Mapped, in our debate over the promise of the independent data layer (Change My Mind: The Independent Data Layer). But, in reality, that conversation is almost a year old now, and in that year companies like Mapped were in the early days of product-to-market fit. We took a moment to dive into what’s new at Mapped over the last year.

Hey friends, Before we shut down Nexus Labs’ consulting practice in early 2022, we had the opportunity to support one last building in Manhattan. This building had more submeters per square foot, per floor, per system, and per tenant than any building I've ever seen. AND, perhaps predictably, all that data was barely being used.

In 2023, Nexus Labs hosted the Buyer’s Guide to Advanced Supervisory Control, where Exergenics took the stage to showcase the strides they are making in the central utility plant (CUP) optimization. We caught up with Exergenics to see what’s new in 2024.

Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace

Hey friends, Nexus Labs is quickly becoming the go-to place for building owners to learn about and engage with vendors. To support buyers, we’re announcing a new (free) service! One unfortunate truth holding back the smart buildings industry is that buying technology

Hey friends, Nexus Labs is becoming the go-to place for building owners to learn about and engage with vendors. To support them, one offering is our free monthly buyer’s guide webinars—a monthly series doing a deep dive into one tech category at a time.

Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series (and whitepaper) on navigating the smart buildings marketplace.

KIPP Schools is a network of public charter schools throughout the United States that is open to all students. KIPP stands for Knowledge is Power Program, a program with a proven track record of academic excellence.

Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the smart buildings marketplace, AKA the vendor swamp, less murky. To consolidate all the content we’ve produced on this, we’re publishing a newsletter series

QuadReal Property Group is a global real estate investor and operator with over $73 billion in real estate assets and counting. In 2019, Thano Lambrinos joined the QuadReal team. Amid the building industry's transition to digitizing everything, Lambrinos and the QuadReal team were eager to embrace new technologies to differentiate themselves from competitors.

Hey friends, For years, we’ve been trying to make the vendor swamp, AKA the smart buildings marketplace, less murky. We’ve been tracking the marketplace for many years and sharing insights with the Nexus Pro Community.

Limbach Holdings provides mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and control (MEP+C) contracting services to building owners throughout the United States. The Limbach team struggled with consistently gathering the data and insights they needed from different building equipment in a standardized fashion to provide efficient and data-driven services to those buildings.

Hey friends, Smart buildings are created by long-term programs, not individual technologies or projects. But in our interviews with 50+ smart buildings technology buyers, we uncovered an inconvenient insight that is holding back our industry: 

Episode 161 is a Nexus Labs Update featuring James Dice speaking on the shifts in focus of Nexus Labs. Enjoy!

University of California, Irvine (UCI) is a 36,000-student, 224-degree public university in Irvine, California. UCI has partnered with Altura Associates, an engineering advisor and trusted master systems integrator (MSI). Since 2016, these two entities have been collaborating on a campus-wide project to bring the campus facilities technology to the forefront of the industry. 

Hey friends, This week we have a thought-provoking, future-looking guest essay from Drew DePriest, Director of Real Estate Operations Technology at McKesson.

Hey friends, Thank you for all the feedback on last week’s first-of-its-kind newsletter. In case you missed it, we helped two different Buyers narrow the vast occupancy counting marketplace down to a shortlist of the 2-3 best vendors for them.

Did you miss our January Pro Member Gathering? Catch the replay here!

Hey friends, Today, let’s change it up around here with a new type of newsletter. ✨ Nexus Labs has just completed two vendor selection processes for Buyers. Now, we’re sharing the results

Episode 160 features Nathan Morris from KIPP, Stephen Dawson from Normal Software, and Terry Herr from Intellimation. This conversation explores KIPPs partnerships between Normal Software and Intellimation to better manage school facilities and increase savings to bring money back into the classrooms. Enjoy!

Building owners have many opportunities to decarbonize their own buildings to meet their carbon targets, but sometimes their money can be better spent decarbonizing other people’s buildings. That’s WattCarbon’s thesis, and one we believe in too. So much so that we (along with dozens of you) invested in their seed round last year.

Happy New Year! It’s delightful to be back at it after unplugging from work over the holidays. I needed some rest—and found it in the form of movies, TV shows, and of course, English Premier League soccer. 

The software operating commercial buildings hasn't changed much since before I was born. The first Building Automation Systems came about in the 1980s, with the ability to schedule equipment operation, create setpoints, and program sequences of operations. They could also store data (“trends”), display that data on a graphic, and alert operators to alarming readings (“alarms”).

Episode 159 features Thano Lambrinos from Quadreal and Wayne Kim from Andorix. This conversation explores the partnership between Quadreal and Andorix and how the implementation of a new network has made an impact on Quadreal. Enjoy!

We’ve been convening the changemakers of the smart buildings industry for 4 years. In 2024, it's time to finally meet up in person—at the very first NexusCon.

This case study discusses the Empire State Realty Trust's systematic approach to building retrofits and technology deployments with Kode Labs.

Episode 158 features Richard Davis from Limbach Holdings. This conversation explores how Limbach Holdings is integrating FDD and energy management softwares into their HVAC and plumbing services. Enjoy!

The Nexus Pro community manager, Eric Larsen, posed a compelling prompt to our 600-member community: “Many of us agree that “Use Cases” are the building blocks of a Smart Building. However, I haven’t heard a single, significant, concise definition. How can that be if they’re so important?!”

Episode 157 features McGee Young from WattCarbon, Alan Greenberg, and DR Richardson from Elephant Energy and is our 7th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. This conversation explores how WattCarbon can bridge the gap for property owners and vendors, while simultaneously validating their decarbonization efforts. Enjoy!

The filterable Nexus Labs content library on our website tells me that since 2020, we’ve published 21 podcasts, 16 newsletters, and 10 members-only events on the independent data layer, building operating systems, digital twins, or single “pains” of glass. What do all these buzzwords topics have in common? They’re all used to describe the technologies at the data layer of the smart buildings stack. They’re all used to bring data from multiple silos together so it can be leveraged in software applications for better outcomes. 

This case study explores how Sleep Country responded to challenges by deploying “AI-enabled thermostats” in its 214 stores.

We have a funny saying in our industry: “Every building is a snowflake”. Have you heard it? It’s used to describe the complexity of scaling smart building technology.

Episode 156 features Mary de Guzman from Sleep Country and Omar Tabba from BrainBox AI and is our 6th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. Mary and Omar discuss the benefits of installing AI enabled thermostats in several hundred retail stores. Enjoy!

Last week, we summarized the ‘Category First’ buyer—the ones who start the buying process by assessing an entire category of technology vendors. Only after validating that the category moves the needle do they engage the marketplace in a serious way.

We’re back with another installment of our Marketplace series of newsletters. In the smart buildings technology marketplace, there’s a type of buyer I call “Category First” buyers. They start the buying process by assessing a category of technology vendor. And only after validating that the category moves the needle do they engage the marketplace. 

Episode 155 features Dana Schneider from Empire State Realty Trust and Etrit Demaj from KODE Labs and is our 5th episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. These are not marketing fluff stories, these are lessons from leaders that others can put into use in their smart buildings programs. Dana dives into their systematic approach to building retrofits, leading with The Empire State Building, and why they publish what they do. Enjoy!

Welcome to the Nexus Pro member digest… a collection of recent highlights you shouldn’t miss. These digests are designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper wherever you’d like.

Carrie Denning Jackson gives the Nexus Pro Community a candid run-down of all her efforts across the forward-thinking organization.

We’re back with another installment of our Marketplace series of newsletters. One of the unfortunate truths holding back the smart buildings industry is that buying technology takes so much work that it could be a full-time job. For each new technology added to the program, here are the steps it takes:

Episode 154 features Joseph Fleshman from University of California, Irvine and Jim Meacham from Altura Associates and is our fourth episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. Joe and Jim talk in depth about the systematic overhaul of University of California Irvine’s building automation system, operational technology networking, and deploying fault detection and diagnostics software. Enjoy!

Episode 153 features Ben Cooper from BGO (BentallGreenOak) and is our third episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies. Ben talks about the asset type due diligence and rate of adoption for their new infrastructure platform, the overall efficiencies created, and the future proofing abilities with a cloud connection application layer. Enjoy!

Buyers: This new ‘Marketplace’ newsletter series is written just for you. Being a Buyer in the smart building technology market requires you to start thinking in categories. The Nexus Marketplace currently has 47 different categories—and counting!

Welcome to the Nexus Pro member digest… a collection of recent highlights you shouldn’t miss. These digests are designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper wherever you’d like.

The August Pro member gathering doubled as Nexus Labs' second debate. See how Liam Bates, Tom Balme and David Sciarrino argued for and against recurring fees for IoT sensors.

“The most effective form of return on investment (ROI) that is tangible and measurable is operational expenditure (Opex) savings”

Episode 152 is the second episode in our new workforce series, In The Field. In The Field features people working boots on the ground in the built environment, giving real-life perspectives on their roles, backgrounds, and aspirations. Episode 152 features Stacks+Joules graduate and senior controls technician Nathanseth Cruz of Dual Fuel and Stacks+Joules Founder and Executive Director Michael Conway.

Episode 151 dives into what James and Rosy do at Nexus Labs beyond the podcast. From the pro membership community, to the courses platform, partnerships, and the marketplace, this episode brings you up to speed on all things Nexus Labs.

Edge cloud has the promise of both the benefits of full cloud, and all the benefits of staying on-premise. This is the middle ground—that Goldilocks sweet spot of not too big, not too small. Not too flat, not too on-prem. ‍

Today, I want to tell you a quick story about my career.This will help explain the changes I made 6 years ago that I credit for helping me make an impact in smart buildings industry—changes that might help others trying to find their feet as the industry blazes forward.

Here's something to ponder: Do we have any apps that 'assure the success' of smart buildings technology? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The story of a 5-year effort at LONG Building Technologies to integrate fault detection and diagnostics, or FDD, into their service operations.

The 150th Nexus Podcast Episode! Episode 150 features LONG Building Technologies and is our second episode in the Case Study series looking at real-life, large-scale deployments of smart building technologies.

Welcome to the Nexus Pro member digest… a collection of recent highlights you shouldn’t miss. These digests are designed to save you time and allow you to catch up on the whole month. Then you can dive deeper wherever you’d like.

Tyrone Mawing joins our APAC/Australia Monthly Pro Member Gathering for a discussion on the integration challenge of smart buildings.