Wading through the vendor swamp [Marketplace #2]

Hey friends,

We’re back with another installment of our Marketplace series of newsletters.

Series theme: Navigating the smart building technology marketplace  

This week’s topic: The work required to create a shortlist of vendors

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One of the unfortunate truths holding back the smart buildings industry is that buying technology takes so much work that it could be a full-time job.

For each new technology added to the program, here are the steps it takes:

And to make this even more difficult, it often requires working together across at least 3 departments (operations, sustainability, IT).

And yet, there are very few full-time “buyers” out there. We’ve interviewed directors of sustainability, VPs of operations, and managers of operational technology. It’s clear that buying new technology for their smart building programs is just one small sliver of their responsibilities.

When you’re integrating technology into an industry that has always run without it, there’s not really a way around the above process. But with 6 million commercial buildings in the US alone, it needs to be easier to buy for smart building technology to actually take off.

One of the opportunities for acceleration is in step 4: Researching New Technologies. At this stage, buyers need to engage with the marketplace to determine the capabilities they need, shortlist vendors that have those capabilities, and then perform due diligence on those vendors to determine which ones to engage with further.

The due diligence process is made harder by the fragmentation in the marketplace. There are dozens of vendors in each category, all saying similar things but using different buzzwords.

And today, there aren’t any viable resources for wading through the vendor swamp. Google search results in apples-to-oranges comparisons. Consultants are vital in this process, but there aren’t enough of them and they’re too expensive for most of the market. Asking your peers is great, until they hold back details because you’re their competition.

Are you a buyer wading through the swamp? A vendor trying to reach buyers?

How’s it going for you? Does this resonate?

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Until next week,
—James Dice, Founder and CEO, Nexus Labs