Hot Takes on MSIs and Integration Technology

Hey Friends,

Next Thursday, August 22nd, we’ll host our Buyer’s Guide to Master Systems Integrators and Integration Technology. 

This will be the 11th Buyer’s Guide that Nexus Labs has provided to the community in the last year (you can watch the rest of them here). We spend a month diving deep into a service or technology, interviewing dozens of experts, skeptics, and providers to conjure a unique and holistic perspective of everything a buyer needs to know about a particular technology or service. During the webinar, Nexus Labs presents on the crowdsourced consensus, then we sprinkle in presentations from leading vendors in the space and finish with an electrifying Q&A where anything goes.

We’re particularly excited to cover Master Systems Integrators (MSIs) and Integration Technology. Based on our tour of knowledge gathering from expert to expert, we expect this to be a rather spicy buyer’s guide. 

Here are some hot takes on MSIs and integration technology we’ve been hearing from the community, which will be hashed out next Thursday. Agree or disagree with some? Hit reply and let us know, then join us for the live event next Thursday.

MSI is a Loaded Term

To call yourself a master electrician, you need 8,000 hours of experience, among other qualifications. To call yourself a master systems integrator, you likely just need a laptop. 

This isn’t to say many MSIs aren’t extremely capable, but knowing what to expect from an MSI isn’t easy. An MSI’s technique depends on their background—they often migrate to the profession from MEP work, design, HVAC control, or A/V. One MSI may focus on building-level integration, ensuring the chillers, meters, and security cameras can be seen in one place. At the same time, other MSIs live at the enterprise level, ensuring data from 500 buildings can be seen in one place. Buyers need to understand what their goal is before finding the MSI that’s right for them.

Integration has Zero Payback

Making two systems talk together doesn’t equal money saved. It is often up to the MSI to explain why integrating systems will help you save money. Our interviews showed us that there’s typically not one big value proposition for integration—people just start to realize the benefits of having the data and the connections you can make with them. It often begins with a need that a silo’d application is failing you on:

• Maybe you’re tired of using clipboards to track air change numbers in hospital rooms.
• Maybe everyone is gossiping about why overrides keep showing up on the systems, but no one is taking credit for them. 
• Maybe you’re paying your controls contractor 16 billable hours to gather trends on disparate water meters.

The point is, integrations are nothing without supporting use cases, but once data is more widely available, the use cases start to snowball.

Quality and Data Integrity are the Most Important Parts of the MSI's Work

What’s worse than inaccurate data on a central utility plant’s natural gas consumption? How about a screen showing the compounding inaccurate data of TWO central utility plants’ natural gas consumption. Or, as the saying goes, “shit in, shit out.”

Before anyone can gather any value from integrating silo’d systems together, the MSI and building owner must ensure quality data from each individual system. When good data becomes available across an entire portfolio, it allows organizations to make truly data-backed decisions, which can entirely change the decision-making culture.

MSIs are the Heroes Breaking Down Decades of Vendor Lock-In

The historic design-build methodologies in the North American contracting industry created a system in which the design and success of HVAC control systems were up to the HVAC controls contractors, not the building owners. This made it all too easy for these controls contractors to put their interests in front of the building owners' interests. Fast-forward a few decades, and you have building owners handcuffed by proprietary controls, software licensing fees, and service exclusivity contracts. 

When integration technology is used to break down silos and create open-source building systems, owners get the ability to choose which service contractors they want to work with, which spurs competition, lowers prices, and ensures that vendors are acting with the building owner’s interest paramount.

MSI Complacency Means Your Building’s Security is at Risk

An MSI is like a locksmith who provides you with a master key that unlocks every room in your castle. While that’s great for you as the castle owner, if a copy of that key gets into the wrong hands, the impact is much more significant than it used to be.

MSIs are allowing more access to data, and they should be spending just as much time securing all the new access they’re creating. However, complacency has many MSIs wiping their hands clean of the project before cybersecurity has been thoroughly considered. Installing edge technologies that create zero-trust architecture and secure access service edge (SASE) allows the MSI to hand off a much cleaner and safer integration project to the owner and service contractors.

Interested in continuing this conversation? Register for our upcoming Buyer’s Guide to Master Systems Integrators & Integration Technology here!

‍

– The Nexus Labs Team