"When we started Facilio, I saw that real estate as a market was a couple of decades behind where telecom is today. In last 20 years, if you look at telecom as an industry, it has undergone tremendous evolution every few years, every five years, right? From the landline to mobile, within mobile, 2G, 3G, 4G, now 5G, and even the adoption of telecom across the world has been very, very fast… One of the core pillars is their ability to remotely run their operations in a very, very efficient way so that they are able to scale faster, plus they are able to offer a high level of service quality.

Okay, so compare that with buildings. Imagine a telecom tower today is being forced to have one engineer sitting there 24x7, and every few minutes going and checking some terminal, like your BMS room for any alarms, and then calling people to raise tickets… That's how the buildings are operated. So we thought: it’s a huge opportunity for us to apply technology like the power of cloud, the power of mobility, internet of things, machine learning into real estate operations and maintenance… We want to bring that level of sophistication into real estate so that real estate owners and operators are able to operate the portfolio very, very efficiently."

—Prabhu Ramachandran, CEO, Facilio

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Episode summary

Episode 6 is a conversation with Prabhu Ramachandran, CEO of Facilio, a software as a service platform for facility operations and maintenance. I really like where they're headed, and this was a really fun conversation.

• We talk about how Prabu was inspired by remote monitoring practices in the telecom industry and why he launched Facilio in the commercial real estate space.

• We talk about the next wave of smart buildings, which Prabu calls CRE 3.0.

• We deep dive into Facilio software, including the architecture of the suite of native apps, how it provides a single pane of glass for operators,

• And much more

This episode of the podcast is directly funded by listeners like you who have joined the Nexus Pro membership community. Subscribe to Nexus Pro to support the podcast, join the community, and get access to a deep dive into my reaction, my top highlights of this episode, and a full transcript of this and all episodes. Pro members get these weekly deep dives, access to the Nexus Vendor Landscape, and can participate in exclusive discussions and events.

You can find Prahbu on LinkedIn and at facilio.com.

Enjoy!

Mentions and Links

1. Facilio (2:45)
2. Zoho (2:50)
3. Ephraim Yarkmak (9:09)
4. CRE 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 (9:45)
5. Single Pane of Glass (42:01)
6. Nexus Podcast Episode 4 ~ vendor service contracts (46:40)
7. Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls (51:15)
8. FUTUREPROOF (55:50)

THE ABOVE AUDIO, VIDEO, SUMMARY, AND LINKS WILL ALWAYS BE FREE. PODCAST DEEP DIVES WITH MY REACTIONS, MY TOP HIGHLIGHTS, AND THE FULL TRANSCRIPT ARE EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS OF NEXUS PRO.

Here’s this week’s deep dive outline:

• James’ reaction and lightbulbs moments
• James’ highlights and summary of each
• What is CRE 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0?
• How are you approaching FDD?
• Facilio’s suite of native applications
• Can some of these apps replace the supervisory functions in the BMS?
• What does a strategic roadmap to advanced supervisory control look like?
• What does having a platform + application architecture mean?
• How does the platform architecture allow building owners to have the coveted “single pane of glass”?
• The four ways building owners save money with the platform
• Full transcript

Go deeper