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Episode 173 is a conversation with James Dice, Rosy Khalife, and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs.
Episode 173 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife, and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
Intro to Brad (1:57)
Decarbonization Software (6:50)
Maintenance Management RFI (16:36)
Integrating, Connecting, and Securing Devices (27:02)
Workplace Experience (35:36)
Sign off (41:57)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S676003-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro Membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 a month.
Second, you can upgrade from the Pro Membership to our courses offering. It's headlined by our flagship course, the Smart Building Strategist. And we're building a catalog of courses taught by world leading experts on each topic under the smart buildings umbrella third. And finally, our marketplace is how we connect leading vendors with buyers looking for their solutions.
The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.
Welcome back to the Nexus podcast. I'm your host, James dice. I have my friends, Rosie and Brad here with me today. We're going to walk through four things that happened over the last few [00:01:00] weeks. In the smart buildings industry that you all should know about. This is intended to give you a taste of what's going on in our community while you're walking your dog or you're commuting.
And this is just a taste though. So for the full experience, the best way to engage with us is to be subscribed to our newsletter, the Nexus newsletter, where you can get all of the news. You can get our full take on each of these headlines. You can get every piece of content we publish and the invites to all of our events.
So it's basically how you avoid FOMO as someone interested in smart buildings technology. Um, now this is Brad's first podcast ever in his life. Um, it's never been on a podcast before, and this is Rosie's first since she became a mom last year. So that's fun. Um, so I want you to, to sort of, uh, catch the audience up on yourselves.
Brad, please introduce yourself, uh, and talk about what you do and what you've been up to lately.
Brad Bonavida: [00:02:00] Uh, Brad Bonavita, head of product at Nexus Labs. So, uh, at work, uh, recently I've been mainly focusing on our content as always. Uh, we're really, our, our motto is smart buildings without the fluff, but really taking that to heart, making sure that we're producing content that people care about, that is adding to their day to day is what I spend most of my time doing, and then outside of work.
Um, this weekend I made a Greek gyro for the first time and Rosie, I've been meaning to talk to you about it because I know you're a pretty exceptional chef and I'm just an amateur, but I got to say it was, it was extremely good. So I'm pretty proud. I have a picture. Oh
James Dice: my God. Does this have lamb, have lamb in it, Brad?
Brad Bonavida: No, I cheated. I used ground turkey, which is totally not authentic, but it was really good. It was really good. Trust me. Trust me.
Rosy Khalife: That sounds awesome. That's great. That's great.
James Dice: , what have you been up to lately?
Rosy Khalife: Wow. Um, we have, you know, since the [00:03:00] conference, I would say Nexus land has been very busy in a good way.
And so our conference was sort of the, the climax of all of that. And it has Since progressed, uh, so I've been really focused on working with our partners. So our partners are our vendors in the community that we work with on telling their stories and what they're up to and all the great things that they're doing, sharing that and making sure everyone knows about it.
So I've been doing a lot of that type of work and then also we're starting to think about our conference like it feels like it's. It's far away because the last one was just a couple of months ago, but this next one's coming up in a weird way. And so, you know, closer than it even seems. And so focusing on that and who's coming and making sure people are getting their tickets and submitting abstracts and doing all of that.
So it's been a busy time, but I feel like I'm really proud of all the things that we've been able to accomplish this year so far. Um, and. You [00:04:00] know, that's what I've been up to from a work perspective, uh, from a home perspective, James shared. Yes, I'm a new mom. Um, I have a 11 month old. He's turning 11 months tomorrow, uh, at home and his name is Peter.
He is such a sweetie. And so that's been really fun to navigate. Becoming a parent and keeping it all together and all of that, the juggle, um, but it's been great. And I have a lot of help and support that makes it possible to do all of that.
James Dice: Awesome. Um, as for me, um, I have been calling a lot of people in our community lately and I keep catching myself saying, talking about the conference as if it's next year and it is not next year.
It is fully this year. And it's almost like the world's kind of moving too fast for me. So I'm like, yeah, what do you think about coming to the conference next year? And I'm like, ah, that's not true. It's, it's actually October 6th. So, uh, [00:05:00] it is very much this year by the time this podcast comes out, it will be seven months away.
Um, so basically I've been calling everyone to try to get people to, uh, make sure they're planning on submitting abstracts. I had a, uh, a joke of a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago talking about how, how to ensure that you won't be able to speak at NexusCon. And basically the, the, the key to speaking is to make sure you submit an abstract by April 5th.
And so we're making sure everyone knows about that deadline and is planning on submitting their abstract. We don't want it to feel like it's too big of a deal, like this, this abstract thing, it is not like this mystical long thing that, you know, someone has to plan out. We really just want the ideas so that we can make sure we're putting the right stuff in the agenda that the community cares about.
So give us your ideas. Uh, tell us you want to speak or else we won't know that. And we probably won't put you in the speaker lineup. So thank you. Um, [00:06:00] we've also been posting the recordings from last year. So 2024 NexusCon on our website, those are posted for members only. So you can get a short preview of each session if you're not a member.
But we advise you if you want to check out some of those sessions, which we'll be talking about one of them here today, you need to be joined as a Nexus pro member. All right. All that being said, let's jump into the news. Um, let's start Rosie, what do you got for us?
Rosy Khalife: All right. Um, first up is the headline that stood out to us for energy managers, commissioning agents, and service contractors.
And this was actually something that James also posted on his LinkedIn. So I don't know if you guys follow him there, but Definitely should. It's a lot of fun, a lot of good posts. Uh, so this was LBNL's, uh, building technologies team. They actually did a report on DECARB software and in the Nexus Marketplace, we call that audits and retrofits software.
And so this report is a great primer. I don't know if you all have, have had a [00:07:00] chance to read it yet, but it will be in the show notes. And this covered the tools that are available for planning DECARB projects. And I'm going to let. Uh, Brad, jump in with his thoughts on it.
Brad Bonavida: Sure. So this was super interesting for me because I'm constantly building out the Nexus marketplace and they do a really good job in the intro of like talking about the different softwares and the ecosystem and how they fit together.
Um, so it was interesting to like map the software they talk about to how we talk about it at the application layer in the Nexus Marketplace. Uh, so they talk about ESG software and how that's been around for a while to track greenhouse gas emissions and report on. We basically call that sustainability reporting.
We also have a category for carbon accounting, but those linked pretty well. Then they talk about E M I S or energy management information software and how that's been around for a while to help people like analyze building performance and in the marketplace that maps well too. We split that into a couple of like fragmented sections like we have [00:08:00] meter analytics and utility bill analytics and a couple of different ways that people are tracking building performance and energy usage.
Um, and then kind of what they hit on is those two have been around for a while. But now there's this new category that's been growing that's, um, that they call decarbonization software. That's what the report is really about. And that's, you know, helping people develop like a portfolio level plan for greenhouse gas reduction.
And that maps really well to what we call audits and retrofit software. So that's kind of the new theme that is emerging that they talk about really well is that more people are like using software to make the plan for what they're going to do for their portfolio moving forward. And my big takeaway was that this is kind of a classic example of like traditional consulting that's being evolved or evolving into a software based approach.
And this doesn't mean that there's no professional services in it, but, um, you know, with the new capabilities in the software, people are starting with that like [00:09:00] approach of, okay, let's take all our data in and let's use a audits and retrofit software to Try to plan what we should prioritize throughout our whole portfolio rather than just doing that.
Um, you know, humans alone. Um, and then I'll just give them some credit. Like there's a really good visual. I thought of how those three softwares go together. It's on page eight of the report. And it's like, it's almost like our tech stack that we always explain flipped. To the side, but you can see, you know, on the left side, they have like all these device layer is what we call it.
Solutions like meters and utility bills and other information from your building and how that all feeds into these softwares. Well, it actually feeds into a data layer data lake, then into these different software and how they kind of interact and get you to the point of. What can you actually do to your portfolio tomorrow to make it better?
So overall, I thought it was a super good report. It was cool to see how it mapped to the marketplace. And, um, yeah, we have all those vendors in the marketplace as well. So it was cool to like compare notes on how they, uh, look at the capabilities of certain vendors [00:10:00] versus how we do it.
James Dice: Yeah, it was funny to see that on linked in people commenting like, Hey, they didn't include us.
And, uh, it's funny because we then went back to check our marketplace and make sure that we had all the vendors included in the report. Um, I think all the vendors out there need to know that it's tough to stay on top of. All the vendors that are in each category. And we try to do that, uh, especially for a researcher at a lab.
Like they're not paid to stay on top of the marketplace, right? They're, they're, they're just reaching out to who, who they can hear about. Um, but we, we can say that all those vendors in that marketplace and the ones that we're missing are definitely in, um, our marketplace. So, um, what's funny that I thought here is, you know, we have these different categories that you just laid out, Brad.
Um, It's funny how much all of the workflows for an energy manager. Or a sustainability manager are sort of, um, crossing the boundaries of those different [00:11:00] categories. And so it feels a lot to me, like every vendor, say you're a vendor in one of those categories, you're probably going to want to expand to the other categories or else your customers are going to need.
Two different software applications to complete your workflows. And when you add in this audits and retrofits piece, it feels a lot like it's the same users that need that information just like all the other three categories. And so what I see is like, it's going to be table stakes to probably have all four in the future, even though when you look at the marketplace right now, um, they're not the same vendors in all four categories, right?
Um, Another interesting piece that I thought, when I was thinking, when I was walking through this report is, um, I didn't realize that jail and products that are in this category were public until I saw the report. You know, our community had told us about them. We knew about them. Um, so jail has carbon [00:12:00]pathfinder and CBR has.
A platform called their zero platform. I had never seen them publicly talked about until this report, which I thought was interesting. I think those are going to be big players here, considering the way that both JLL and CBR are sort of staffing up their sustainability teams and investing in technology.
And so if you think about the footprints. You know, neither of those companies own buildings, but they sure as hell manage a lot and manage a lot of projects for a lot of building owners. And so those two software applications in particular seem pretty, pretty well suited to sort of win, win those categories if there are winners.
Um, and I think we should, we should also talk about the services provided here. Um, so. Brad, you mentioned basically a way to sort of do software before services or sort of replace some of the services with software. [00:13:00] Um, some of our partners have a really good, um, sort of tie in here, um, insight, which people can find all of our partners on, on our, on their partner pages, which we'll put in the show notes.
Insight uses software. In the background, but basically leads with services. So they're basically using all these categories of software, but they're, they're basically an outsourced member of the building owner's team, you know, using technology. So technology driven services, um, backpack networks has a lot of good technology around getting the right asset data into the software.
Because if you think about decarbonization, Decarbonization really depends on getting the right information on what assets you have so that you can then retrofit and upgrade them later. And so if people look at the lead backpack has a demo on our demos page, walking through how they sort of use technology to make sure that they get all of the [00:14:00] heavy lifting of that asset data into the software to inform those decarbonization plans, which I think is important.
Um, and then Gradium, right? We've talked to, we had Gradium on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. Um, Gradium is obviously using the meter data to then inform their projects, but then they also go the step further. Which they actually will help you do the projects in California. Um, so that that's interesting ways in which software then drives other services.
So
Brad Bonavida: yeah, that, that gray area between software and services is becoming more gray. Like obviously if you're going to decarbonize your portfolio, there's always going to be consultative services involved with that. But these softwares are kind of the leading edge for a lot of. These vendors in the space.
James Dice: Yeah. So if you're a building owner, you're thinking, do I want to buy just software and I have enough people on staff to use that software, or am I buying some combination of the two, you know, technology combined with outsourced service providers, [00:15:00] um, and then I just have to like shout out us here because LB and L's, you know, releasing this report about decarbonization software in 2025, we have an essay on our site.
Talking about replacing decarbonization spreadsheets from 2022. So it's a three year old essay that people can go check out that basically predicts the rise of this category. Right. And we've had, you know, investors reach out and make. Make VC investments based off of that essay. And I think we're seeing like what happened three years later after not necessarily like we caused, I'm not trying to say we caused this category, but we definitely predicted that this category would, would have the place that it has today.
Um, yeah. And I think the last thing here before we move on is that we had a lot of people commenting on LinkedIn, like you guys should know about us. And I just want to tell them that like, we, we don't reach out [00:16:00] to random vendors anymore to learn about what they do. Like we put them in our marketplace.
And then really, if you're a vendor wanting us to know about what you do, you really need to talk to us about becoming a partner. Like that takes time to watch your demo and analyze what you're doing. And we really include that as part of our partnership services, like. If we're going to learn what you do and where you fit, like you need to be, you know, in our ecosystem and partner with us for us to do that.
I just want to selfishly mentioned that we are a business that if you want us to know about you, we don't just, you know. Study for free
Brad Bonavida: pivoting to the next headline that stood out to us. This one's for, uh, you know, facility managers and property managers, people digitizing and operations and digitizing maintenance.
Uh, and this comes from us, from our own ecosystem of what the content we're creating, uh, the takeaways from our maintenance management RFI that we just performed. So if you're not familiar with this. This journey that [00:17:00] we go on, um, I'll explain it real quick, but really, um, we had a group of building owners who all reached out to us and were interested in learning more about maintenance management software or CMMS, computerized maintenance management software.
So when we hear it from multiple people, we say, okay, let's like get something together here to learn more about this. category. Um, so we interview those building owners. We figure out what they're looking for, what they need, what they don't need, all those things. We created an RFI that had, I don't know, 20, 30 questions in it that were, you know, specific to what they were looking for.
And we put that RFI out to everyone we know in our marketplace who's in maintenance management software. Um, and then, you know, those, those vendors have a chance to respond, but the way they do things. Uh, we got 16 responses. Yeah. James, you got something?
James Dice: Yeah, real quick. I just wanted to kind of, um, for people that are wondering, we're not trying to.
Um, compete or replace consulting services, right? This is more upstream of the consulting services, which is basically just like what's out there [00:18:00] and what our technology vendors capable of. We're not really replacing a RFP. We're not really replacing consultative, you know, helping with roadmap planning or not, you know, all of the stuff that our, our built buyers consultants in our community do.
We're not trying to compete with that. In fact, the buyers consultants will use this. And are using this information when they access the marketplace today.
Brad Bonavida: Yep. Good point. I mean, this is really like a data sharing project that we're doing with those building owners. Like we're interested in this data.
They're interested in this data. We figure it out, hand it off, um, and you know, let them make their decisions. Uh, so with that, you know, we reached out. We got 16 responses from different vendors and we shared that data with those building owners. We also used that data along with interviews of other building owners to create our buyer's guide to maintenance management software.
Um, so that's also live on our website. You can go to the buyer's guides and you can see the recording for [00:19:00] that. Uh, we had, uh, Brian Vaughn from FPC Global also help us out with that because he's got a lot of experience in it. Um, and if I were just quickly to give some of my big takeaways from like this whole journey, we went on, um, you know, we start to settle on the core capabilities of what maintenance management software is at the beginning.
And James, you and I had a bunch of, I think, really solid behind the scenes conversations that evolved that throughout the process, you know? So what I mean by that, some examples for people is like. A core capability of maintenance management software is it's got to be able to do your workflows for your maintenance people.
So that's like work order workflows, preventative maintenance workflows, condition based workflows. It has to be able to do that. It also should be able to give your technicians some insight into their job. Like, how is it making it easier because they have this application than if they didn't have this application?
Is it telling them historical things that happened to that unit or? Information about what typically goes wrong with [00:20:00] that unit integration to FTD. I don't know, but it's got to help them out somehow. Um, and then the real like aha moment for me, James was when we were talking about the data part of it, because initially we talked about digital asset registers being a separate category in the marketplace.
That was like this data layer category. And we went back and forth and we actually realized. We think digital asset register is like a capability of a maintenance management software. Like if you are going to be providing all these workflows, you have to be some sort of a data hub for this service, right?
You have to be able to, um, be maintaining asset information. You have to be able to be maintaining information on what has happened to these units, these systems previously. Um, so throughout the data part. You know, the capabilities that are clear. There is like, how do you do tagging standardization? Um, visit was one of our partners who came up who does, you know, has a bunch of capabilities to make sure that people can tag [00:21:00] systems within their buildings effectively.
Um, and then, yeah, how are you storing asset information for future work? Then beyond that, there's a Bunch of capabilities that are like nice to haves that aren't core capabilities, but there's, you know, people doing some pretty unique stuff outside of that. Um, Facilio and other partner of ours, they had a bunch on like refrigeration specific asset information.
So being able within their system to track like how refrigeration charges are changing over time and more granular refrigeration data, which I know James, you've been, you know, diving into that whole subject as well. So those were like the big takeaways for me. Um, yeah. What do you think, James?
James Dice: Yeah, I think, I think that combined with other conversations with other partners has led me down this refrigeration management rabbit hole, which people will see articles coming out.
Uh, we'll be publishing articles. That are, that are as a result of me going down that rabbit hole. It's fascinating, but we'll save that for right now. Um, what, what I've seen though, is like Facilio [00:22:00] integrates that refrigeration management into their CMMS. But what I've actually realized it's, it's, it's like you peel back the layers of the onion and you realize there is another silo out there, actually another category of vendors.
That only provide refrigeration management that's separate from a CMMS. And so you, you'll go to a lot of building owners out there that have these two separate software applications. One for managing refrigerants and one for managing other assets, which I think is just absurd. So I really like how Facilio does it, which is like, these are just workflows and assets and asset will help you provide a refrigerant workflow, but it's on the same asset database that you're using to manage all your other assets.
So I think I like their philosophy. Um, this, this RFI also was like really fascinating for me in that. You know, we got 16 responses, so it's, I think it's a pretty good sample size for how this category of vendors. Thinks about serving building owners. And I was surprised by how much their [00:23:00] responses kind of view themselves as standalone solutions.
Um, the exception is obviously Facilio, which Facilio people can check out our white paper on our website with Facilio to talk, like, to show how they think differently. Um, but I, I was really thinking about how, if you're a building owner and all of the vendors that are responding to you wanting to be your CMMS, if they all think that they're on this Island, uh, it's, it's, it leaves you with some conundrums, like for instance, one of the conundrums the building owners are going to have is how do I do condition, condition based maintenance, I want to enable.
Maintenance based on my data that I have and maintenance based on my, my other systems. But if your CMMS isn't thinking about pulling in data from other systems, then how are you supposed to do condition based maintenance? Right. Um, another one is where like building owners, what we've heard is they want a single source of truth for their asset data.
But if the CMMS is your only, like one of [00:24:00] your, your databases where you have asset data and they're not thinking about integrating with other places, well, then you don't have a single source of truth. You have many sources of truth. And so I think
Brad Bonavida: very true.
James Dice: Yeah. And we had a good discussion. People can check out the webinar.
We won't spoil it. Good discussion in the Q and a section with Brian Vaughn about that and a lot of good questions around that as well. So, um, yeah, people can go check out that webinar. It's on our website. Um, Rosie, did you have anything to add? You were in the audience.
Rosy Khalife: I was in the audience. Um, I think one thing that was interesting, we keep hearing about change management.
You know, it's, it's a topic that everyone's thinking about. I guess I was a little surprised at how important that piece also ties into this piece. Like if you're. adopting this technology? How are your people actually using it? And what are you doing to set them up for success to ensure that they're actually using it in the right way in a way that actually makes their job better?
Um, so that was interesting at all. It all sort of comes back to the [00:25:00]change management. Like, how are we, what are we doing about that and how are we approaching it? And so there's something there where. Maybe as Nexus, we can, we can better help as it relates to that topic because it feels like a really important one for, for all of us to be thinking about right now.
Brad Bonavida: That change management piece feels particularly true for this one because of who the application touches and who the user is. Like, I think that's key when you're thinking about change management is like, if you're thinking of who's using the maintenance management application. It's boots on the ground, people getting jobs done and they're busy and like are trying to get their stuff done.
So if this application is an obstacle to their job, even for two weeks, like that could, you know, crash and burn the whole program. So like. Change management was so strong here with people talking about like intuitiveness and how good their user interface was and all those type of things. So good point, Rosie.
I agree.
James Dice: Yeah. And so that's if we, if we try to say something good about all the vendors who responded, [00:26:00] that was a great thing that we saw in the RFI responses. Like they all See that and they're all, they're all mainly focused on making their, their tools easier, easier, easier to use.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah, that's fair. Um, I saw one of the responses had more of a service component where they actually will do that change management.
Like they, there's a. Total onboarding process to them, then actually implementing technology, which I think is maybe needed in some cases where this is totally new for them. Right? And so that that service piece really comes into play where they're sort of holding your hand along the way. All right, let's jump to our next topic.
So this is the headline that stood out to network managers. It's not really a headline because it's a, it's a Nexus headline, but it's what stood out to next to network managers, integrators, and cybersecurity folks. And we are pulling this from one of our recordings from NexusCon. So hopefully you were there and you maybe got to see this live.
I actually was not in this [00:27:00] session. So I watched it after, and I just want to shout out April Yee for being such an incredible emcee. This specific session was on OT with an IT mindset, and she crushed it. If you all don't know who that is, she is the director of digital engineering at CBRE. She's going to be at NexusCon 2025.
So she's incredible. And this session brought together a lot of really great people. Um, it's, it's a, it's a wonderful one to listen to. If you're a pro member, you'll have access to this. If you're not, it's really easy to become one, but we had Kilroy and Neve talking together. We had, uh, Drew Dupree's. Uh, Doug from Dartmouth, Andrew Rogers from, um, Ace IoT, Ping from Optego Networks.
So just a lot of really smart people coming together to talk about how do we ensure that our buildings are not only smart, but they're also secure and reliable. And I feel like that's a topic that keeps coming up time and time again. Just how do, it's so hard, right? Like [00:28:00] you're managing so many things at once.
And so how do we think about. Cyber security. At the same time, we're thinking about how do we make sure that we're not mitigating our own risk from an I. T. Perspective. And so all these things come together, and I feel like they did a really good job of trying to simplify it and create some actionable items that come that come out of it.
So, um, James, I'd love for your take, though, on it and what you thought of it.
James Dice: You guys, I have a dirty secret. I haven't watched this one. Oh,
Rosy Khalife: okay. Okay. Okay. Um,
James Dice: I think, you know, it being just us three, we've done a little bit of a divide and conquer. We were dividing and conquering at the conference. Whereas, you know, we were all in one session, couldn't be in all of them at once.
And then since the recordings got posted, we've done a little divide and conquer as well. Um, I do think it's cool though. So Brad is working on a piece about a written piece about some of the stuff that was talked about in this session. So I've absorbed a little bit, but I think it's cool how this [00:29:00] group worked together.
Um, so at Nexus con, there were 20 different 90 minute sessions. So all of the speakers were in charge of together, making this session the best it could be, even though they each had their own individual presentations. I liked how this group really tied together. A five step framework and sort of structure to their 90 minute session.
And I think it really sets the bar. On what speakers should strive for at NexusCon. We've, we've created this, um, package, which is the 90 minute session. You guys are responsible as speakers in that session for making that thing, move the industry forward as much as possible. And I think that really worked with NexusCon 2024.
And we're going to keep doing that with 2025. And so the, the, the five step, um, sort of framework they provided here. Mixes a bunch of metaphors together, which I also think is hilarious. So I'm going to kind of walk through the different, different ones here. So scout the industry. To fill in [00:30:00] your team lineup.
So we have like a sports metaphor there, a scouting metaphor. Uh, it always starts with the people is basically what that one means. And the next one is, uh, is hire a bouncer, uh, which means basically get rid of all your unmanaged shit on your networks. Um, which is like a bar metaphor, I guess. Um, basically, yeah, club.
And then the next one is bake a layered cake, which is multiple layers to your network, which is like the horizontal architecture that we, I think that we. Uh, you know, produce a lot of content on, so that's a baking metaphor. The next one is, uh, get a smartwatch for your network, uh, which is basically analyze your network.
There's a whole category of technology around that to make sure that, you know, it's working well. Uh, that's obviously a fitness metaphor. And the next one is set the game rules, the governance of, of your, of managing your network. I guess that's another sports metaphor, maybe. So we've got [00:31:00]four different types of metaphors there.
In general, though, I really Love how they put this together because it, it ties all of their presentations together into one.
Rosy Khalife: Um, real quick, it would be such a fun game to figure out from all the speakers who we think came up with each of these metaphors, like Drew, probably the bouncer, like he likes to go to concerts, like there's something there, Andrew, maybe the cake, he loves food.
I mean, I mean, we could go. We could do all these. Easy. We could. We could. All these. Next time. You gotta
Brad Bonavida: give, uh, another shout out to April too because, um, at the beginning of the session, cause it was the first nerdy session. It was in the practitioner room. She had like nerds, you know, candy to give out to everyone to like set the tone.
So yeah, that's, that was good too. Yeah.
Rosy Khalife: I heard about all that. I wish I was in that room. Sounds like a lot of fun.
Brad Bonavida: It was solid. Yeah. So my, my takeaway is, uh, what kept coming up was. The word governance, [00:32:00] and I feel like it's like, it's not sexy to think about like making your OT network better with governance, but it was like clearly crucial to all of these organizations who are part of it.
And when I think about that, it's like getting ahead of the next one, right? Building processes so that you're ahead of the next problem before it actually occurs in your network management. So like for Kilroy, you know, Byron was talking about, he was making up some funny examples of. In the past, technicians going to Best Buy and buying the cheapest unmanaged switch to get their new application up and running as fast as possible.
And oh, other people are going to be using it. So let's set our username and password to admin admin all caps so that my buddy who works the other shift can get into, um, and then talk about the glow up, right? Because now They've got, you know, need secure edge on like everything. And every vendor that comes in there is on a user by user basis.
Right? So if you're a vendor and you go into their [00:33:00] system, it's not like I represent vendor X it's like, no, I'm Jill from vendor X and this is my profile. And like the level that they've gotten to with that is pretty impressive. Um, Drew with McKesson, his example was how when he got there, there was like no process for assigning IPs, like everyone was just like, I don't know how we get IPs, you just ask and tell someone answers and like sitting people down and building this flowchart of like, this is now how we get IP addresses assigned to devices.
And that's governance, right? That's like creating these processes. So the next one doesn't get all screwed up.
James Dice: Um, and then, and real quick, Brad on that. We had a good, um, I think it was a few years ago, a podcast with Joe Gaspardoni of Montgomery Technologies, and he talked about how there's, I think it's something like four changes per month or four changes per week.
Maybe Joe will have to come back. We'll have to dig that out. But all the things that are happening in a building at any given time, there's so many different changes to the [00:34:00] network. And so you're talking about getting ahead. And Joe's point was, You know, this is what they do at Montgomery Technologies as a service is what is your process for every time something happens?
How are you enacting that? Right. Um, so I think this kind of hits on the themes we've been hitting out for a while as well.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And then, uh, I was going to bring up from Dartmouth's perspective. What I thought was really interesting was when. Uh, Doug was talking about what open source means to Dartmouth and like why that's important to them.
I'd never quite heard a building owner's perspective the way he put it. I actually like pulled out the quote he said here. So I'm just going to read what he said. He said, uh, if I want to do something, I have to buy something. And sometimes there just isn't something for me to buy. It's actually cheaper and faster to do it myself, write a little script and do some discovery rather than having an 800 pound gorilla, AKA vendors do it for me.
So I just thought that was like. It really gave me a lot of empathy for that situation of like, [00:35:00] I just need my software to do this, but it can't do that. And like how open source allows him to build that and like be contributing and solve these little problems, you know, himself. Um, and that, you know, I think just goes to show there like.
You know, really solid partnership with ACE IoT solutions. Cause if you know those guys, they're always talking about open source and they're, you know, bringing up things like this, that is enabling their, you know, their customers to do stuff through open source tools. So I thought that was pretty cool, pretty compelling to see how.
You know, Dartmouth is using open source tools.
James Dice: All right. Last one, guys. We got, we got a couple minutes left here. We got to get to this last one. This last one's about workplace experience. And it's basically of all the things that stood out to us. This is what matters to sort of the corporate real estate and workplace experience people.
Um, so this one was CBRE publishing a role. I look at the role of AI in workplace technology. I thought this one was funny in how the word AI is being used now. Um, you know, we've [00:36:00] been talking about marketing fluff for five years, but they're basically saying like a bunch of smart building technology use cases that we've been talking about for a long time, these are now AI for some, somehow.
So they're essentially talking about. Space utilization, they're talking about, um, occupancy based HVAC control. They're talking about tech enabled maintenance, like basically monitoring your building. Uh, they're talking about room booking and other like occupant experience style use cases, the stuff that we talk about all the time.
But now that's being enabled by AI. I just feel like that's a little extra. Um, the, another thing they're talking about here is, um. They have a next action engine, which I think is interesting. I don't know what this is. Maybe we'll have to, the people in our audience from CBRE can reach out and tell us what this is, but connecting the right insights to the right persona at the right moment to drive proactive and strategic decision making.
I don't know if that's a word salad or like an actual real [00:37:00] thing, but it sounds, it sounds cool. Um, what do you guys think?
Brad Bonavida: It was, it was short, it was surface level, but they had 10, like, here's how AI can be in your building. So I, if I were a building owner, I'd be interested to see like, am I, am I hitting any of these?
Am I hitting some of them? Um, but really I think, uh, it's this common trend where like everybody has too much data now. And it's just like, are there new creative ways to. Like figure out how to use that data that you have too much of that you don't actually know what you're going to do with. So to me, the takeaway here is like having too much data is no longer an excuse because all of these examples were basically like step two, right?
Step one was that something was installed that allowed a building owner to have a lot of data about something occurring in their building. And this was about the second step. Okay, what are you doing with that data? And quote unquote AI, you know, being a solution to you doing something with too much data.
So that's my takeaway.
James Dice: It speaks [00:38:00] to like getting your data to where it's actually useful, right? I think a lot of building owners right now don't have that data in a way that is basically all together, all modeled properly, all sort of ready to be used by these different applications.
Rosy Khalife: It also feels like from the building owner perspective, like getting the first step was figuring out how many people are in our space and that felt like its own hurdle, right?
That was, that was hard. How do we do that? Okay. We, we did that. We figured that out somehow. And now the targets moving. Not only do we need to know. How many people are in our space? That's a given. Like that's nobody cares anymore. It's how are they using the space? And then not just how are they using the space?
How are they using, knowing how they're using the space, but in a way that feels secure, anonymous, like doesn't feel like we're invading anyone's privacy. No one wants that. Right. And so what are the devices that we're using that keep. That at the forefront and how are we actually doing this? So, you [00:39:00] know, from a building owner perspective, not that I'm the building owner voice, but it feels like I've been, I've been the voice of the building owner on this call, it feels really hard.
Like it feels like, you know, each time I'm figuring out what I need to do, that's changing and now I have to do more things and I have to. Find more information and figure out how to use my data and even better ways to better use my spaces, to better serve my tenants, to better serve, you know, right. And so, um, I think my takeaway from this was we really need to collaborate.
And if, if the building owners are not telling the technology providers or their service providers, What they need and what their needs are, they won't get them. Right. And so they have to be telling them like, here's what our ideal goal is. How do you help us get to that point? And maybe it doesn't happen right away, but there's a step.
There's a plan in place to get them, get them there and get them what they actually need.
James Dice: Yeah. I feel like the style of marketing though, you're not, when I read this, this [00:40:00] style of, of essay or blog post, or in this case, it's more of a listicle. So this style of like saying building owners need all these things, AI driven, blah, blah, blah.
What do you think from a marketing standpoint, Rosie, that I don't know that building owners are out there saying like, I need all these things. It's sort of like it's being jammed down their throats a little bit.
Rosy Khalife: I know. It's so tough. It's, it's jammed down their throats in a way that isn't going to make them move.
Like it's not going to make them jump on it. Right? Like it's not helping them. It's not teaching, but it's meant to create
James Dice: like this urgency. I think that's why people use this AI thing. It's like AI is hot right now. And so they're basically saying like using AI is this, but then they're just repackaging all of these old things that we've been talking about for a long time.
I don't know that that like actually creates the urgency that marketers think that they they're, they're creating.
Rosy Khalife: And it's not even about this article. I think it's in general, everyone is using AI, especially in our [00:41:00] world, using AI as, as though that's the compelling event in and of itself. Like you should have AI, you know, how are you using AI right now?
You need to be doing X, Y, Z as though that in and of itself is going to make me jump on it. And that's just not. It's it's not clear. It's not enough. It's not enough of a reason. It's not adding value. It's not teaching me anything. Like, why don't you teach me something? It's
James Dice: noisy.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah. Totally. I was just talking with a company, with one of our partners actually visit today, and she was telling me how, you know, they've been around for a while.
They've been using AI since the beginning. Like she, you know, maybe I don't even know if they used to call it AI. Like it's just how they built their company. Right. And so now as a marketer, she's struggling because other companies are using throwing AI. And so how do you vet what's out there? Like, how do you even.
What's AI versus another AI? Like, what does that even mean? How do you compare companies at that point? Tough one.
James Dice: It is tough. All right. We got, we got to close this down. Let's [00:42:00] do our sign off here. Um, we're going to bring something back from the old school of the Nexus podcast, which is carve outs. So carve outs are just something from our personal lives.
They may or may not connect with smart buildings. And in my case, it does. So I've been watching severance. And Brad sounds like you've watched severance Rosie's been under a rock and hasn't watched severance at all, but, but severance has, it's a show on apple, apple tv plus, for those of you don't know, and it's, um, basically this, this premise is that they get an operation and it separates them into two selves.
So they're in, they're in work self is called there any. They're out of work or personal life self is called their Audi. And it has this like retrofuturism, they call it, which is a sci fi term that I didn't really know about. But basically when they're at the office at work there, it's like eighties technology.
So you have, um, all these old school computers, you have mid century modern sort of design. It feels like you're in the eighties, but then when they go [00:43:00] home, they have smartphones and it's like modern day. So this has a pretty obvious tie into smart buildings, because I feel like a lot of people feel like when they go to their building that they manage, it runs on eighties technology.
And then when they go home, they have smart thermostats and they have smart phones in their pockets and they, we have technology that can do all these things, Roomba vacuums, right? But when you go to the. And you go to the actual commercial building. It's like some decade past, you know, so there's been a lot of memes that apparently you guys haven't been seeing about that are severance memes that I feel like we should be using more severance memes in our content.
So we'll see that. We'll see that come out. Rosie, what's yours?
Rosy Khalife: Wow. Love that. Mine is so random. I don't even know if it qualifies as a carve out, but I was trying to emulate you in the fact that you're talking sort of about technology. So my mom came to visit and she's obsessed with power banks, which if you all don't know, obviously you do is a way for you to charge your [00:44:00] phone.
And so she got me one and she's obsessed with it and she kept wanting me to use it and I didn't want to. So anyways, long story short, I am now obsessed with it also. She has void. They've changed a lot. That's my message to all of us. They've changed a lot. It is now one device that you chart that has the outlet attached to it and has the cords to charge your different devices all in one.
It's really fantastic and highly recommend and you don't think you're going to need it, but trust me, you're going to want it. And so that's my carve out
James Dice: I'll add the one I have
Rosy Khalife: in my
James Dice: mom. I think maybe you went backwards, like backwards
Brad Bonavida: that resonated with me. I haven't tried it again in like two years.
So I'm like, all right, maybe I need to buy a new one.
Rosy Khalife: I'm telling you. I'm serious.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. All right. I'll have to get the brand from you. My carve out is. I, this weekend I went to a, a [00:45:00] shoe store, a running shoe store with my wife and when I walked in there, I'm like, I, I do a lot of running, but I love my shoes.
I've been running in ultras for the past, like five years. They're perfect. They don't hurt my feet. Don't break it if it's not, or don't fix it if it's
James Dice: not broken. I also run an ultra. So whatever you're about to say is going to make, um, I'm ready for it. What is it?
Brad Bonavida: Well, I, I mean, I told the guy that, well, I walked into the store who obviously is a much more experienced runner and shoe person than I am.
And he was like, Oh, that's great that they, you know, feel so good for you, but their durability, durability is terrible. There's all these other brands who make shoes that feel exactly the same, but last twice as long. And I was kind of shook because this was something I thought I had solved. And now I'm like.
Am I wasting money and missing out on the same shoe with better durability? So my reflection to the audience is what is your equivalent in work or, uh, you know, work or home life where like, You think you've got it, but perhaps there's something [00:46:00] that's actually a way better product out there that's going to solve your problem in ways that you didn't even realize you had a problem.
James Dice: Like a multi charger. Exactly. All right. Good, good, good carve outs. I think they all relate to smart buildings in some way, so we'll have to get weirder for next time. All right, guys. Thanks.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends. Thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of changemakers, we need your help for the next couple of months. We're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen, it would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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Episode 173 is a conversation with James Dice, Rosy Khalife, and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs.
Episode 173 features James Dice, Rosy Khalife, and Brad Bonavida from Nexus Labs. In this episode of the Nexus Podcast, the Nexus Labs team breaks down the top stories relevant to energy managers, facility managers, IT/OT managers, and workplace managers.
Introduction (0:50)
Intro to Brad (1:57)
Decarbonization Software (6:50)
Maintenance Management RFI (16:36)
Integrating, Connecting, and Securing Devices (27:02)
Workplace Experience (35:36)
Sign off (41:57)
Music credits: There Is A Reality by Common Tiger—licensed under an Music Vine Limited Pro Standard License ID: S676003-16073.
Note: transcript was created using an imperfect machine learning tool and lightly edited by a human (so you can get the gist). Please forgive errors!
James Dice: [00:00:00] Hey friends, if you like the Nexus podcast, the best way to continue the learning is to join our community. There are three ways to do that. First, you can join the Nexus Pro Membership. It's our global community of smart building professionals. We have monthly events, paywall, deep dive content, and a private chat room, and it's just 35 a month.
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The links are below in the show notes. And now let's go on to the podcast.
Welcome back to the Nexus podcast. I'm your host, James dice. I have my friends, Rosie and Brad here with me today. We're going to walk through four things that happened over the last few [00:01:00] weeks. In the smart buildings industry that you all should know about. This is intended to give you a taste of what's going on in our community while you're walking your dog or you're commuting.
And this is just a taste though. So for the full experience, the best way to engage with us is to be subscribed to our newsletter, the Nexus newsletter, where you can get all of the news. You can get our full take on each of these headlines. You can get every piece of content we publish and the invites to all of our events.
So it's basically how you avoid FOMO as someone interested in smart buildings technology. Um, now this is Brad's first podcast ever in his life. Um, it's never been on a podcast before, and this is Rosie's first since she became a mom last year. So that's fun. Um, so I want you to, to sort of, uh, catch the audience up on yourselves.
Brad, please introduce yourself, uh, and talk about what you do and what you've been up to lately.
Brad Bonavida: [00:02:00] Uh, Brad Bonavita, head of product at Nexus Labs. So, uh, at work, uh, recently I've been mainly focusing on our content as always. Uh, we're really, our, our motto is smart buildings without the fluff, but really taking that to heart, making sure that we're producing content that people care about, that is adding to their day to day is what I spend most of my time doing, and then outside of work.
Um, this weekend I made a Greek gyro for the first time and Rosie, I've been meaning to talk to you about it because I know you're a pretty exceptional chef and I'm just an amateur, but I got to say it was, it was extremely good. So I'm pretty proud. I have a picture. Oh
James Dice: my God. Does this have lamb, have lamb in it, Brad?
Brad Bonavida: No, I cheated. I used ground turkey, which is totally not authentic, but it was really good. It was really good. Trust me. Trust me.
Rosy Khalife: That sounds awesome. That's great. That's great.
James Dice: , what have you been up to lately?
Rosy Khalife: Wow. Um, we have, you know, since the [00:03:00] conference, I would say Nexus land has been very busy in a good way.
And so our conference was sort of the, the climax of all of that. And it has Since progressed, uh, so I've been really focused on working with our partners. So our partners are our vendors in the community that we work with on telling their stories and what they're up to and all the great things that they're doing, sharing that and making sure everyone knows about it.
So I've been doing a lot of that type of work and then also we're starting to think about our conference like it feels like it's. It's far away because the last one was just a couple of months ago, but this next one's coming up in a weird way. And so, you know, closer than it even seems. And so focusing on that and who's coming and making sure people are getting their tickets and submitting abstracts and doing all of that.
So it's been a busy time, but I feel like I'm really proud of all the things that we've been able to accomplish this year so far. Um, and. You [00:04:00] know, that's what I've been up to from a work perspective, uh, from a home perspective, James shared. Yes, I'm a new mom. Um, I have a 11 month old. He's turning 11 months tomorrow, uh, at home and his name is Peter.
He is such a sweetie. And so that's been really fun to navigate. Becoming a parent and keeping it all together and all of that, the juggle, um, but it's been great. And I have a lot of help and support that makes it possible to do all of that.
James Dice: Awesome. Um, as for me, um, I have been calling a lot of people in our community lately and I keep catching myself saying, talking about the conference as if it's next year and it is not next year.
It is fully this year. And it's almost like the world's kind of moving too fast for me. So I'm like, yeah, what do you think about coming to the conference next year? And I'm like, ah, that's not true. It's, it's actually October 6th. So, uh, [00:05:00] it is very much this year by the time this podcast comes out, it will be seven months away.
Um, so basically I've been calling everyone to try to get people to, uh, make sure they're planning on submitting abstracts. I had a, uh, a joke of a LinkedIn post a few weeks ago talking about how, how to ensure that you won't be able to speak at NexusCon. And basically the, the, the key to speaking is to make sure you submit an abstract by April 5th.
And so we're making sure everyone knows about that deadline and is planning on submitting their abstract. We don't want it to feel like it's too big of a deal, like this, this abstract thing, it is not like this mystical long thing that, you know, someone has to plan out. We really just want the ideas so that we can make sure we're putting the right stuff in the agenda that the community cares about.
So give us your ideas. Uh, tell us you want to speak or else we won't know that. And we probably won't put you in the speaker lineup. So thank you. Um, [00:06:00] we've also been posting the recordings from last year. So 2024 NexusCon on our website, those are posted for members only. So you can get a short preview of each session if you're not a member.
But we advise you if you want to check out some of those sessions, which we'll be talking about one of them here today, you need to be joined as a Nexus pro member. All right. All that being said, let's jump into the news. Um, let's start Rosie, what do you got for us?
Rosy Khalife: All right. Um, first up is the headline that stood out to us for energy managers, commissioning agents, and service contractors.
And this was actually something that James also posted on his LinkedIn. So I don't know if you guys follow him there, but Definitely should. It's a lot of fun, a lot of good posts. Uh, so this was LBNL's, uh, building technologies team. They actually did a report on DECARB software and in the Nexus Marketplace, we call that audits and retrofits software.
And so this report is a great primer. I don't know if you all have, have had a [00:07:00] chance to read it yet, but it will be in the show notes. And this covered the tools that are available for planning DECARB projects. And I'm going to let. Uh, Brad, jump in with his thoughts on it.
Brad Bonavida: Sure. So this was super interesting for me because I'm constantly building out the Nexus marketplace and they do a really good job in the intro of like talking about the different softwares and the ecosystem and how they fit together.
Um, so it was interesting to like map the software they talk about to how we talk about it at the application layer in the Nexus Marketplace. Uh, so they talk about ESG software and how that's been around for a while to track greenhouse gas emissions and report on. We basically call that sustainability reporting.
We also have a category for carbon accounting, but those linked pretty well. Then they talk about E M I S or energy management information software and how that's been around for a while to help people like analyze building performance and in the marketplace that maps well too. We split that into a couple of like fragmented sections like we have [00:08:00] meter analytics and utility bill analytics and a couple of different ways that people are tracking building performance and energy usage.
Um, and then kind of what they hit on is those two have been around for a while. But now there's this new category that's been growing that's, um, that they call decarbonization software. That's what the report is really about. And that's, you know, helping people develop like a portfolio level plan for greenhouse gas reduction.
And that maps really well to what we call audits and retrofit software. So that's kind of the new theme that is emerging that they talk about really well is that more people are like using software to make the plan for what they're going to do for their portfolio moving forward. And my big takeaway was that this is kind of a classic example of like traditional consulting that's being evolved or evolving into a software based approach.
And this doesn't mean that there's no professional services in it, but, um, you know, with the new capabilities in the software, people are starting with that like [00:09:00] approach of, okay, let's take all our data in and let's use a audits and retrofit software to Try to plan what we should prioritize throughout our whole portfolio rather than just doing that.
Um, you know, humans alone. Um, and then I'll just give them some credit. Like there's a really good visual. I thought of how those three softwares go together. It's on page eight of the report. And it's like, it's almost like our tech stack that we always explain flipped. To the side, but you can see, you know, on the left side, they have like all these device layer is what we call it.
Solutions like meters and utility bills and other information from your building and how that all feeds into these softwares. Well, it actually feeds into a data layer data lake, then into these different software and how they kind of interact and get you to the point of. What can you actually do to your portfolio tomorrow to make it better?
So overall, I thought it was a super good report. It was cool to see how it mapped to the marketplace. And, um, yeah, we have all those vendors in the marketplace as well. So it was cool to like compare notes on how they, uh, look at the capabilities of certain vendors [00:10:00] versus how we do it.
James Dice: Yeah, it was funny to see that on linked in people commenting like, Hey, they didn't include us.
And, uh, it's funny because we then went back to check our marketplace and make sure that we had all the vendors included in the report. Um, I think all the vendors out there need to know that it's tough to stay on top of. All the vendors that are in each category. And we try to do that, uh, especially for a researcher at a lab.
Like they're not paid to stay on top of the marketplace, right? They're, they're, they're just reaching out to who, who they can hear about. Um, but we, we can say that all those vendors in that marketplace and the ones that we're missing are definitely in, um, our marketplace. So, um, what's funny that I thought here is, you know, we have these different categories that you just laid out, Brad.
Um, It's funny how much all of the workflows for an energy manager. Or a sustainability manager are sort of, um, crossing the boundaries of those different [00:11:00] categories. And so it feels a lot to me, like every vendor, say you're a vendor in one of those categories, you're probably going to want to expand to the other categories or else your customers are going to need.
Two different software applications to complete your workflows. And when you add in this audits and retrofits piece, it feels a lot like it's the same users that need that information just like all the other three categories. And so what I see is like, it's going to be table stakes to probably have all four in the future, even though when you look at the marketplace right now, um, they're not the same vendors in all four categories, right?
Um, Another interesting piece that I thought, when I was thinking, when I was walking through this report is, um, I didn't realize that jail and products that are in this category were public until I saw the report. You know, our community had told us about them. We knew about them. Um, so jail has carbon [00:12:00]pathfinder and CBR has.
A platform called their zero platform. I had never seen them publicly talked about until this report, which I thought was interesting. I think those are going to be big players here, considering the way that both JLL and CBR are sort of staffing up their sustainability teams and investing in technology.
And so if you think about the footprints. You know, neither of those companies own buildings, but they sure as hell manage a lot and manage a lot of projects for a lot of building owners. And so those two software applications in particular seem pretty, pretty well suited to sort of win, win those categories if there are winners.
Um, and I think we should, we should also talk about the services provided here. Um, so. Brad, you mentioned basically a way to sort of do software before services or sort of replace some of the services with software. [00:13:00] Um, some of our partners have a really good, um, sort of tie in here, um, insight, which people can find all of our partners on, on our, on their partner pages, which we'll put in the show notes.
Insight uses software. In the background, but basically leads with services. So they're basically using all these categories of software, but they're, they're basically an outsourced member of the building owner's team, you know, using technology. So technology driven services, um, backpack networks has a lot of good technology around getting the right asset data into the software.
Because if you think about decarbonization, Decarbonization really depends on getting the right information on what assets you have so that you can then retrofit and upgrade them later. And so if people look at the lead backpack has a demo on our demos page, walking through how they sort of use technology to make sure that they get all of the [00:14:00] heavy lifting of that asset data into the software to inform those decarbonization plans, which I think is important.
Um, and then Gradium, right? We've talked to, we had Gradium on the podcast a couple of weeks ago. Um, Gradium is obviously using the meter data to then inform their projects, but then they also go the step further. Which they actually will help you do the projects in California. Um, so that that's interesting ways in which software then drives other services.
So
Brad Bonavida: yeah, that, that gray area between software and services is becoming more gray. Like obviously if you're going to decarbonize your portfolio, there's always going to be consultative services involved with that. But these softwares are kind of the leading edge for a lot of. These vendors in the space.
James Dice: Yeah. So if you're a building owner, you're thinking, do I want to buy just software and I have enough people on staff to use that software, or am I buying some combination of the two, you know, technology combined with outsourced service providers, [00:15:00] um, and then I just have to like shout out us here because LB and L's, you know, releasing this report about decarbonization software in 2025, we have an essay on our site.
Talking about replacing decarbonization spreadsheets from 2022. So it's a three year old essay that people can go check out that basically predicts the rise of this category. Right. And we've had, you know, investors reach out and make. Make VC investments based off of that essay. And I think we're seeing like what happened three years later after not necessarily like we caused, I'm not trying to say we caused this category, but we definitely predicted that this category would, would have the place that it has today.
Um, yeah. And I think the last thing here before we move on is that we had a lot of people commenting on LinkedIn, like you guys should know about us. And I just want to tell them that like, we, we don't reach out [00:16:00] to random vendors anymore to learn about what they do. Like we put them in our marketplace.
And then really, if you're a vendor wanting us to know about what you do, you really need to talk to us about becoming a partner. Like that takes time to watch your demo and analyze what you're doing. And we really include that as part of our partnership services, like. If we're going to learn what you do and where you fit, like you need to be, you know, in our ecosystem and partner with us for us to do that.
I just want to selfishly mentioned that we are a business that if you want us to know about you, we don't just, you know. Study for free
Brad Bonavida: pivoting to the next headline that stood out to us. This one's for, uh, you know, facility managers and property managers, people digitizing and operations and digitizing maintenance.
Uh, and this comes from us, from our own ecosystem of what the content we're creating, uh, the takeaways from our maintenance management RFI that we just performed. So if you're not familiar with this. This journey that [00:17:00] we go on, um, I'll explain it real quick, but really, um, we had a group of building owners who all reached out to us and were interested in learning more about maintenance management software or CMMS, computerized maintenance management software.
So when we hear it from multiple people, we say, okay, let's like get something together here to learn more about this. category. Um, so we interview those building owners. We figure out what they're looking for, what they need, what they don't need, all those things. We created an RFI that had, I don't know, 20, 30 questions in it that were, you know, specific to what they were looking for.
And we put that RFI out to everyone we know in our marketplace who's in maintenance management software. Um, and then, you know, those, those vendors have a chance to respond, but the way they do things. Uh, we got 16 responses. Yeah. James, you got something?
James Dice: Yeah, real quick. I just wanted to kind of, um, for people that are wondering, we're not trying to.
Um, compete or replace consulting services, right? This is more upstream of the consulting services, which is basically just like what's out there [00:18:00] and what our technology vendors capable of. We're not really replacing a RFP. We're not really replacing consultative, you know, helping with roadmap planning or not, you know, all of the stuff that our, our built buyers consultants in our community do.
We're not trying to compete with that. In fact, the buyers consultants will use this. And are using this information when they access the marketplace today.
Brad Bonavida: Yep. Good point. I mean, this is really like a data sharing project that we're doing with those building owners. Like we're interested in this data.
They're interested in this data. We figure it out, hand it off, um, and you know, let them make their decisions. Uh, so with that, you know, we reached out. We got 16 responses from different vendors and we shared that data with those building owners. We also used that data along with interviews of other building owners to create our buyer's guide to maintenance management software.
Um, so that's also live on our website. You can go to the buyer's guides and you can see the recording for [00:19:00] that. Uh, we had, uh, Brian Vaughn from FPC Global also help us out with that because he's got a lot of experience in it. Um, and if I were just quickly to give some of my big takeaways from like this whole journey, we went on, um, you know, we start to settle on the core capabilities of what maintenance management software is at the beginning.
And James, you and I had a bunch of, I think, really solid behind the scenes conversations that evolved that throughout the process, you know? So what I mean by that, some examples for people is like. A core capability of maintenance management software is it's got to be able to do your workflows for your maintenance people.
So that's like work order workflows, preventative maintenance workflows, condition based workflows. It has to be able to do that. It also should be able to give your technicians some insight into their job. Like, how is it making it easier because they have this application than if they didn't have this application?
Is it telling them historical things that happened to that unit or? Information about what typically goes wrong with [00:20:00] that unit integration to FTD. I don't know, but it's got to help them out somehow. Um, and then the real like aha moment for me, James was when we were talking about the data part of it, because initially we talked about digital asset registers being a separate category in the marketplace.
That was like this data layer category. And we went back and forth and we actually realized. We think digital asset register is like a capability of a maintenance management software. Like if you are going to be providing all these workflows, you have to be some sort of a data hub for this service, right?
You have to be able to, um, be maintaining asset information. You have to be able to be maintaining information on what has happened to these units, these systems previously. Um, so throughout the data part. You know, the capabilities that are clear. There is like, how do you do tagging standardization? Um, visit was one of our partners who came up who does, you know, has a bunch of capabilities to make sure that people can tag [00:21:00] systems within their buildings effectively.
Um, and then, yeah, how are you storing asset information for future work? Then beyond that, there's a Bunch of capabilities that are like nice to haves that aren't core capabilities, but there's, you know, people doing some pretty unique stuff outside of that. Um, Facilio and other partner of ours, they had a bunch on like refrigeration specific asset information.
So being able within their system to track like how refrigeration charges are changing over time and more granular refrigeration data, which I know James, you've been, you know, diving into that whole subject as well. So those were like the big takeaways for me. Um, yeah. What do you think, James?
James Dice: Yeah, I think, I think that combined with other conversations with other partners has led me down this refrigeration management rabbit hole, which people will see articles coming out.
Uh, we'll be publishing articles. That are, that are as a result of me going down that rabbit hole. It's fascinating, but we'll save that for right now. Um, what, what I've seen though, is like Facilio [00:22:00] integrates that refrigeration management into their CMMS. But what I've actually realized it's, it's, it's like you peel back the layers of the onion and you realize there is another silo out there, actually another category of vendors.
That only provide refrigeration management that's separate from a CMMS. And so you, you'll go to a lot of building owners out there that have these two separate software applications. One for managing refrigerants and one for managing other assets, which I think is just absurd. So I really like how Facilio does it, which is like, these are just workflows and assets and asset will help you provide a refrigerant workflow, but it's on the same asset database that you're using to manage all your other assets.
So I think I like their philosophy. Um, this, this RFI also was like really fascinating for me in that. You know, we got 16 responses, so it's, I think it's a pretty good sample size for how this category of vendors. Thinks about serving building owners. And I was surprised by how much their [00:23:00] responses kind of view themselves as standalone solutions.
Um, the exception is obviously Facilio, which Facilio people can check out our white paper on our website with Facilio to talk, like, to show how they think differently. Um, but I, I was really thinking about how, if you're a building owner and all of the vendors that are responding to you wanting to be your CMMS, if they all think that they're on this Island, uh, it's, it's, it leaves you with some conundrums, like for instance, one of the conundrums the building owners are going to have is how do I do condition, condition based maintenance, I want to enable.
Maintenance based on my data that I have and maintenance based on my, my other systems. But if your CMMS isn't thinking about pulling in data from other systems, then how are you supposed to do condition based maintenance? Right. Um, another one is where like building owners, what we've heard is they want a single source of truth for their asset data.
But if the CMMS is your only, like one of [00:24:00] your, your databases where you have asset data and they're not thinking about integrating with other places, well, then you don't have a single source of truth. You have many sources of truth. And so I think
Brad Bonavida: very true.
James Dice: Yeah. And we had a good discussion. People can check out the webinar.
We won't spoil it. Good discussion in the Q and a section with Brian Vaughn about that and a lot of good questions around that as well. So, um, yeah, people can go check out that webinar. It's on our website. Um, Rosie, did you have anything to add? You were in the audience.
Rosy Khalife: I was in the audience. Um, I think one thing that was interesting, we keep hearing about change management.
You know, it's, it's a topic that everyone's thinking about. I guess I was a little surprised at how important that piece also ties into this piece. Like if you're. adopting this technology? How are your people actually using it? And what are you doing to set them up for success to ensure that they're actually using it in the right way in a way that actually makes their job better?
Um, so that was interesting at all. It all sort of comes back to the [00:25:00]change management. Like, how are we, what are we doing about that and how are we approaching it? And so there's something there where. Maybe as Nexus, we can, we can better help as it relates to that topic because it feels like a really important one for, for all of us to be thinking about right now.
Brad Bonavida: That change management piece feels particularly true for this one because of who the application touches and who the user is. Like, I think that's key when you're thinking about change management is like, if you're thinking of who's using the maintenance management application. It's boots on the ground, people getting jobs done and they're busy and like are trying to get their stuff done.
So if this application is an obstacle to their job, even for two weeks, like that could, you know, crash and burn the whole program. So like. Change management was so strong here with people talking about like intuitiveness and how good their user interface was and all those type of things. So good point, Rosie.
I agree.
James Dice: Yeah. And so that's if we, if we try to say something good about all the vendors who responded, [00:26:00] that was a great thing that we saw in the RFI responses. Like they all See that and they're all, they're all mainly focused on making their, their tools easier, easier, easier to use.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah, that's fair. Um, I saw one of the responses had more of a service component where they actually will do that change management.
Like they, there's a. Total onboarding process to them, then actually implementing technology, which I think is maybe needed in some cases where this is totally new for them. Right? And so that that service piece really comes into play where they're sort of holding your hand along the way. All right, let's jump to our next topic.
So this is the headline that stood out to network managers. It's not really a headline because it's a, it's a Nexus headline, but it's what stood out to next to network managers, integrators, and cybersecurity folks. And we are pulling this from one of our recordings from NexusCon. So hopefully you were there and you maybe got to see this live.
I actually was not in this [00:27:00] session. So I watched it after, and I just want to shout out April Yee for being such an incredible emcee. This specific session was on OT with an IT mindset, and she crushed it. If you all don't know who that is, she is the director of digital engineering at CBRE. She's going to be at NexusCon 2025.
So she's incredible. And this session brought together a lot of really great people. Um, it's, it's a, it's a wonderful one to listen to. If you're a pro member, you'll have access to this. If you're not, it's really easy to become one, but we had Kilroy and Neve talking together. We had, uh, Drew Dupree's. Uh, Doug from Dartmouth, Andrew Rogers from, um, Ace IoT, Ping from Optego Networks.
So just a lot of really smart people coming together to talk about how do we ensure that our buildings are not only smart, but they're also secure and reliable. And I feel like that's a topic that keeps coming up time and time again. Just how do, it's so hard, right? Like [00:28:00] you're managing so many things at once.
And so how do we think about. Cyber security. At the same time, we're thinking about how do we make sure that we're not mitigating our own risk from an I. T. Perspective. And so all these things come together, and I feel like they did a really good job of trying to simplify it and create some actionable items that come that come out of it.
So, um, James, I'd love for your take, though, on it and what you thought of it.
James Dice: You guys, I have a dirty secret. I haven't watched this one. Oh,
Rosy Khalife: okay. Okay. Okay. Um,
James Dice: I think, you know, it being just us three, we've done a little bit of a divide and conquer. We were dividing and conquering at the conference. Whereas, you know, we were all in one session, couldn't be in all of them at once.
And then since the recordings got posted, we've done a little divide and conquer as well. Um, I do think it's cool though. So Brad is working on a piece about a written piece about some of the stuff that was talked about in this session. So I've absorbed a little bit, but I think it's cool how this [00:29:00] group worked together.
Um, so at Nexus con, there were 20 different 90 minute sessions. So all of the speakers were in charge of together, making this session the best it could be, even though they each had their own individual presentations. I liked how this group really tied together. A five step framework and sort of structure to their 90 minute session.
And I think it really sets the bar. On what speakers should strive for at NexusCon. We've, we've created this, um, package, which is the 90 minute session. You guys are responsible as speakers in that session for making that thing, move the industry forward as much as possible. And I think that really worked with NexusCon 2024.
And we're going to keep doing that with 2025. And so the, the, the five step, um, sort of framework they provided here. Mixes a bunch of metaphors together, which I also think is hilarious. So I'm going to kind of walk through the different, different ones here. So scout the industry. To fill in [00:30:00] your team lineup.
So we have like a sports metaphor there, a scouting metaphor. Uh, it always starts with the people is basically what that one means. And the next one is, uh, is hire a bouncer, uh, which means basically get rid of all your unmanaged shit on your networks. Um, which is like a bar metaphor, I guess. Um, basically, yeah, club.
And then the next one is bake a layered cake, which is multiple layers to your network, which is like the horizontal architecture that we, I think that we. Uh, you know, produce a lot of content on, so that's a baking metaphor. The next one is, uh, get a smartwatch for your network, uh, which is basically analyze your network.
There's a whole category of technology around that to make sure that, you know, it's working well. Uh, that's obviously a fitness metaphor. And the next one is set the game rules, the governance of, of your, of managing your network. I guess that's another sports metaphor, maybe. So we've got [00:31:00]four different types of metaphors there.
In general, though, I really Love how they put this together because it, it ties all of their presentations together into one.
Rosy Khalife: Um, real quick, it would be such a fun game to figure out from all the speakers who we think came up with each of these metaphors, like Drew, probably the bouncer, like he likes to go to concerts, like there's something there, Andrew, maybe the cake, he loves food.
I mean, I mean, we could go. We could do all these. Easy. We could. We could. All these. Next time. You gotta
Brad Bonavida: give, uh, another shout out to April too because, um, at the beginning of the session, cause it was the first nerdy session. It was in the practitioner room. She had like nerds, you know, candy to give out to everyone to like set the tone.
So yeah, that's, that was good too. Yeah.
Rosy Khalife: I heard about all that. I wish I was in that room. Sounds like a lot of fun.
Brad Bonavida: It was solid. Yeah. So my, my takeaway is, uh, what kept coming up was. The word governance, [00:32:00] and I feel like it's like, it's not sexy to think about like making your OT network better with governance, but it was like clearly crucial to all of these organizations who are part of it.
And when I think about that, it's like getting ahead of the next one, right? Building processes so that you're ahead of the next problem before it actually occurs in your network management. So like for Kilroy, you know, Byron was talking about, he was making up some funny examples of. In the past, technicians going to Best Buy and buying the cheapest unmanaged switch to get their new application up and running as fast as possible.
And oh, other people are going to be using it. So let's set our username and password to admin admin all caps so that my buddy who works the other shift can get into, um, and then talk about the glow up, right? Because now They've got, you know, need secure edge on like everything. And every vendor that comes in there is on a user by user basis.
Right? So if you're a vendor and you go into their [00:33:00] system, it's not like I represent vendor X it's like, no, I'm Jill from vendor X and this is my profile. And like the level that they've gotten to with that is pretty impressive. Um, Drew with McKesson, his example was how when he got there, there was like no process for assigning IPs, like everyone was just like, I don't know how we get IPs, you just ask and tell someone answers and like sitting people down and building this flowchart of like, this is now how we get IP addresses assigned to devices.
And that's governance, right? That's like creating these processes. So the next one doesn't get all screwed up.
James Dice: Um, and then, and real quick, Brad on that. We had a good, um, I think it was a few years ago, a podcast with Joe Gaspardoni of Montgomery Technologies, and he talked about how there's, I think it's something like four changes per month or four changes per week.
Maybe Joe will have to come back. We'll have to dig that out. But all the things that are happening in a building at any given time, there's so many different changes to the [00:34:00] network. And so you're talking about getting ahead. And Joe's point was, You know, this is what they do at Montgomery Technologies as a service is what is your process for every time something happens?
How are you enacting that? Right. Um, so I think this kind of hits on the themes we've been hitting out for a while as well.
Brad Bonavida: Yeah, that's great. Yeah. And then, uh, I was going to bring up from Dartmouth's perspective. What I thought was really interesting was when. Uh, Doug was talking about what open source means to Dartmouth and like why that's important to them.
I'd never quite heard a building owner's perspective the way he put it. I actually like pulled out the quote he said here. So I'm just going to read what he said. He said, uh, if I want to do something, I have to buy something. And sometimes there just isn't something for me to buy. It's actually cheaper and faster to do it myself, write a little script and do some discovery rather than having an 800 pound gorilla, AKA vendors do it for me.
So I just thought that was like. It really gave me a lot of empathy for that situation of like, [00:35:00] I just need my software to do this, but it can't do that. And like how open source allows him to build that and like be contributing and solve these little problems, you know, himself. Um, and that, you know, I think just goes to show there like.
You know, really solid partnership with ACE IoT solutions. Cause if you know those guys, they're always talking about open source and they're, you know, bringing up things like this, that is enabling their, you know, their customers to do stuff through open source tools. So I thought that was pretty cool, pretty compelling to see how.
You know, Dartmouth is using open source tools.
James Dice: All right. Last one, guys. We got, we got a couple minutes left here. We got to get to this last one. This last one's about workplace experience. And it's basically of all the things that stood out to us. This is what matters to sort of the corporate real estate and workplace experience people.
Um, so this one was CBRE publishing a role. I look at the role of AI in workplace technology. I thought this one was funny in how the word AI is being used now. Um, you know, we've [00:36:00] been talking about marketing fluff for five years, but they're basically saying like a bunch of smart building technology use cases that we've been talking about for a long time, these are now AI for some, somehow.
So they're essentially talking about. Space utilization, they're talking about, um, occupancy based HVAC control. They're talking about tech enabled maintenance, like basically monitoring your building. Uh, they're talking about room booking and other like occupant experience style use cases, the stuff that we talk about all the time.
But now that's being enabled by AI. I just feel like that's a little extra. Um, the, another thing they're talking about here is, um. They have a next action engine, which I think is interesting. I don't know what this is. Maybe we'll have to, the people in our audience from CBRE can reach out and tell us what this is, but connecting the right insights to the right persona at the right moment to drive proactive and strategic decision making.
I don't know if that's a word salad or like an actual real [00:37:00] thing, but it sounds, it sounds cool. Um, what do you guys think?
Brad Bonavida: It was, it was short, it was surface level, but they had 10, like, here's how AI can be in your building. So I, if I were a building owner, I'd be interested to see like, am I, am I hitting any of these?
Am I hitting some of them? Um, but really I think, uh, it's this common trend where like everybody has too much data now. And it's just like, are there new creative ways to. Like figure out how to use that data that you have too much of that you don't actually know what you're going to do with. So to me, the takeaway here is like having too much data is no longer an excuse because all of these examples were basically like step two, right?
Step one was that something was installed that allowed a building owner to have a lot of data about something occurring in their building. And this was about the second step. Okay, what are you doing with that data? And quote unquote AI, you know, being a solution to you doing something with too much data.
So that's my takeaway.
James Dice: It speaks [00:38:00] to like getting your data to where it's actually useful, right? I think a lot of building owners right now don't have that data in a way that is basically all together, all modeled properly, all sort of ready to be used by these different applications.
Rosy Khalife: It also feels like from the building owner perspective, like getting the first step was figuring out how many people are in our space and that felt like its own hurdle, right?
That was, that was hard. How do we do that? Okay. We, we did that. We figured that out somehow. And now the targets moving. Not only do we need to know. How many people are in our space? That's a given. Like that's nobody cares anymore. It's how are they using the space? And then not just how are they using the space?
How are they using, knowing how they're using the space, but in a way that feels secure, anonymous, like doesn't feel like we're invading anyone's privacy. No one wants that. Right. And so what are the devices that we're using that keep. That at the forefront and how are we actually doing this? So, you [00:39:00] know, from a building owner perspective, not that I'm the building owner voice, but it feels like I've been, I've been the voice of the building owner on this call, it feels really hard.
Like it feels like, you know, each time I'm figuring out what I need to do, that's changing and now I have to do more things and I have to. Find more information and figure out how to use my data and even better ways to better use my spaces, to better serve my tenants, to better serve, you know, right. And so, um, I think my takeaway from this was we really need to collaborate.
And if, if the building owners are not telling the technology providers or their service providers, What they need and what their needs are, they won't get them. Right. And so they have to be telling them like, here's what our ideal goal is. How do you help us get to that point? And maybe it doesn't happen right away, but there's a step.
There's a plan in place to get them, get them there and get them what they actually need.
James Dice: Yeah. I feel like the style of marketing though, you're not, when I read this, this [00:40:00] style of, of essay or blog post, or in this case, it's more of a listicle. So this style of like saying building owners need all these things, AI driven, blah, blah, blah.
What do you think from a marketing standpoint, Rosie, that I don't know that building owners are out there saying like, I need all these things. It's sort of like it's being jammed down their throats a little bit.
Rosy Khalife: I know. It's so tough. It's, it's jammed down their throats in a way that isn't going to make them move.
Like it's not going to make them jump on it. Right? Like it's not helping them. It's not teaching, but it's meant to create
James Dice: like this urgency. I think that's why people use this AI thing. It's like AI is hot right now. And so they're basically saying like using AI is this, but then they're just repackaging all of these old things that we've been talking about for a long time.
I don't know that that like actually creates the urgency that marketers think that they they're, they're creating.
Rosy Khalife: And it's not even about this article. I think it's in general, everyone is using AI, especially in our [00:41:00] world, using AI as, as though that's the compelling event in and of itself. Like you should have AI, you know, how are you using AI right now?
You need to be doing X, Y, Z as though that in and of itself is going to make me jump on it. And that's just not. It's it's not clear. It's not enough. It's not enough of a reason. It's not adding value. It's not teaching me anything. Like, why don't you teach me something? It's
James Dice: noisy.
Rosy Khalife: Yeah. Totally. I was just talking with a company, with one of our partners actually visit today, and she was telling me how, you know, they've been around for a while.
They've been using AI since the beginning. Like she, you know, maybe I don't even know if they used to call it AI. Like it's just how they built their company. Right. And so now as a marketer, she's struggling because other companies are using throwing AI. And so how do you vet what's out there? Like, how do you even.
What's AI versus another AI? Like, what does that even mean? How do you compare companies at that point? Tough one.
James Dice: It is tough. All right. We got, we got to close this down. Let's [00:42:00] do our sign off here. Um, we're going to bring something back from the old school of the Nexus podcast, which is carve outs. So carve outs are just something from our personal lives.
They may or may not connect with smart buildings. And in my case, it does. So I've been watching severance. And Brad sounds like you've watched severance Rosie's been under a rock and hasn't watched severance at all, but, but severance has, it's a show on apple, apple tv plus, for those of you don't know, and it's, um, basically this, this premise is that they get an operation and it separates them into two selves.
So they're in, they're in work self is called there any. They're out of work or personal life self is called their Audi. And it has this like retrofuturism, they call it, which is a sci fi term that I didn't really know about. But basically when they're at the office at work there, it's like eighties technology.
So you have, um, all these old school computers, you have mid century modern sort of design. It feels like you're in the eighties, but then when they go [00:43:00] home, they have smartphones and it's like modern day. So this has a pretty obvious tie into smart buildings, because I feel like a lot of people feel like when they go to their building that they manage, it runs on eighties technology.
And then when they go home, they have smart thermostats and they have smart phones in their pockets and they, we have technology that can do all these things, Roomba vacuums, right? But when you go to the. And you go to the actual commercial building. It's like some decade past, you know, so there's been a lot of memes that apparently you guys haven't been seeing about that are severance memes that I feel like we should be using more severance memes in our content.
So we'll see that. We'll see that come out. Rosie, what's yours?
Rosy Khalife: Wow. Love that. Mine is so random. I don't even know if it qualifies as a carve out, but I was trying to emulate you in the fact that you're talking sort of about technology. So my mom came to visit and she's obsessed with power banks, which if you all don't know, obviously you do is a way for you to charge your [00:44:00] phone.
And so she got me one and she's obsessed with it and she kept wanting me to use it and I didn't want to. So anyways, long story short, I am now obsessed with it also. She has void. They've changed a lot. That's my message to all of us. They've changed a lot. It is now one device that you chart that has the outlet attached to it and has the cords to charge your different devices all in one.
It's really fantastic and highly recommend and you don't think you're going to need it, but trust me, you're going to want it. And so that's my carve out
James Dice: I'll add the one I have
Rosy Khalife: in my
James Dice: mom. I think maybe you went backwards, like backwards
Brad Bonavida: that resonated with me. I haven't tried it again in like two years.
So I'm like, all right, maybe I need to buy a new one.
Rosy Khalife: I'm telling you. I'm serious.
Brad Bonavida: Okay. All right. I'll have to get the brand from you. My carve out is. I, this weekend I went to a, a [00:45:00] shoe store, a running shoe store with my wife and when I walked in there, I'm like, I, I do a lot of running, but I love my shoes.
I've been running in ultras for the past, like five years. They're perfect. They don't hurt my feet. Don't break it if it's not, or don't fix it if it's
James Dice: not broken. I also run an ultra. So whatever you're about to say is going to make, um, I'm ready for it. What is it?
Brad Bonavida: Well, I, I mean, I told the guy that, well, I walked into the store who obviously is a much more experienced runner and shoe person than I am.
And he was like, Oh, that's great that they, you know, feel so good for you, but their durability, durability is terrible. There's all these other brands who make shoes that feel exactly the same, but last twice as long. And I was kind of shook because this was something I thought I had solved. And now I'm like.
Am I wasting money and missing out on the same shoe with better durability? So my reflection to the audience is what is your equivalent in work or, uh, you know, work or home life where like, You think you've got it, but perhaps there's something [00:46:00] that's actually a way better product out there that's going to solve your problem in ways that you didn't even realize you had a problem.
James Dice: Like a multi charger. Exactly. All right. Good, good, good carve outs. I think they all relate to smart buildings in some way, so we'll have to get weirder for next time. All right, guys. Thanks.
Rosy Khalife: Okay, friends. Thank you for listening to this episode. As we continue to grow our global community of changemakers, we need your help for the next couple of months. We're challenging our listeners to share a link to their favorite nexus episode on LinkedIn with a short post about why you listen, it would really, really help us out.
Make sure to tag us in the post so we can see it. Have a good one.
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