Our Very Own NexusCon Exhibit Booth

Hey Friends,

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

We’re one of them.

We’re excited to unveil The Nexus Marketplace — an online platform where buyers and buyers consultants can navigate through the sea (swamp?) of technology and service vendors.

Ironically, The Nexus Marketplace works pretty well at helping people navigate the physical marketplace of exhibitors we have at NexusCon, too. So if you’re here with us, come stop by our booth to determine which vendors you should chat with to best support your smart building needs.

Last week, we published our whitepaper on Navigating the Marketplace. Consider the whitepaper the playbook and The Nexus Marketplace the tool. Together, they give you what you need to make better buying decisions and accelerate the adoption of technology within your buildings. Here’s how we built it:

Thinking in Categories: Within The Nexus Marketplace, we’ve defined 97 building technology and service categories, and counting. It all starts with the definition. As an industry, we must agree on the capabilities and features a solution must have to be in a particular category, or else we’re not talking in the same language. We don’t take vendors’ words for it—we’re using our industry expertise, as well as the support of unbiased buyer’s consultants, to determine which vendors fit into which categories. Their product demos and feature sets must align with the category definition, or they won’t be listed there.

Thinking in Layers: Each of the 97+ categories is nested within one of the six layers. This allows buyers to decipher which vendors have offers spanning multiple layers and helps them visualize how all their pieces fit together up and down the tech stack.

Thinking in Properties: We’re continually adding vendor-specific data like verticals served, number of buildings deployed in, stage of funding, cybersecurity credentials, API documentation, integration paths, and more. Buyers don’t need to worry too much about these properties until they’ve thought through the categories and layers, but in the end these are the metrics that separate the best options from the rest.

Buyer-to-Buyer Collaboration: We’re encouraging buyers to share their experience through anonymous or named reviews of vendors they’ve worked with. Future versions of The Nexus Marketplace will allow buyers to share information about their current technology stack, and get connected to other buyers going through the same thing.

Imagine getting connected with a peer in another organization who is trying to buy the same technology as you. Imagine getting all the lessons learned from a technology implementation that your peer completed last year.

Today, The Nexus Marketplace is free to buyers, buyer’s consultants, and Nexus Labs Partners. As we look forward to getting your feedback on the first version of this tool, we will be hard at work growing our database by relying on our community to crowdsource accurate data:

• Buyers will be asked to submit reviews and share information about the categories and vendors they have used in the past so they can get connected with like-minded buyers.
• Buyers Consultants will support us in vetting vendors for the minimum category requirements, and ensuring we’re all defining each category and property with consensus.
• Vendors will always be listed for free, ensuring that buyers can see all available options. Vendors will be asked to validate how their company is listed so that buyers can more accurately understand what they do.

Welcome to The Nexus Marketplace, where simplifying the buying process will assist in the acceleration of digitized and decarbonized buildings.

If you’re a buyer, buyer’s consultant, or Nexus Labs partner, sign up today. Let us know what features you’d like to see.

— The Nexus Labs Team

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