Verdantix: MRI Software acquires Qube Global Software

MRI Software, a provider of real estate software solutions backed by GI Partners, announced the acquisition of Qube Global Software, a UK-headquartered property and facilities management software vendor. The acquisition will boost US-headquartered MRI Software’s presence in Europe, providing it an additional 280 employees and growing its client list by around 1,000 organizations…

What is the key takeaway for market participants? This acquisition demonstrates yet again consolidation is continuing at a rapid pace in the real estate and facilities software market… Verdantix expects acquisition activity will not slow down given that vendors such as Accruent, Dude Solutions, Condeco and Tango Analytics are backed by private equity funding with ambitious growth plans…

[Admin: To see other related posts, use the Verdantix tag or Tango tag.]

What are Siemens’ strategies for real estate decarbonisation?

Reducing the carbon footprint of buildings and enhancing sustainability are fast becoming business critical issues for institutional real estate investors. But in order to implement an effective green strategy to lower one’s carbon footprint, having access to detailed building performance data and analytics is vital. Siemens is able to achieve this to help investors enhance the value of their real estate portfolios…

Towards low carbon real estate

On average, energy consumption accounts for 40% of the lifecycle costs of buildings. For those wishing to optimise their real estate and demonstrate green credentials, and compliance with global standards, such as Europe’s Energy Efficiency Directive (EED) and LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design), commonly used in the US, Siemens is able to plot a path to greater transparency and performance…

The power of big data

To connect buildings and foster smart buildings, in February 2016, the Siemens Buildings Technologies Division partnered with IBM to maximise the potential of connected buildings and the data they create to empower real estate owners and operators to drive business results and meet building-related KPI’s. As a result, Siemens develops integral solutions with IBM‘s software suites Maximo (asset management) and TRIRIGA (workplace management) and envisages use cases to apply Watson IoT analytics. A cognitive building can anticipate, respond, and adapt…

[Admin: As a thought-provoking counterpoint, the following piece reveals a mathematical flaw in current climate models that are supposed to predict the rate of global warming for every doubling of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air.]

Carbon scare is over?

In December 2016, Lord Christopher Monckton reveals a breaking discovery which may prove the entire “climate change” scare is based on faulty mathematics. At the “Global-Warming; an Inconvenient Lie” conference in Phoenix, AZ, Lord Monckton covers in-depth the mathematical discovery his team has made and announces that these findings have been submitted for proper peer review…

[Admin: At time index 3:29, the 4.5 K value is highlighted. But looking at Lord Monckton’s London presentation from September 2016, the 2.2 K should be highlighted instead. Basically, the flaw was taking the mid-value of T (at 3.0 K) on the y-axis, instead of taking the mid-value of F (at 0.485) on the x-axis. That’s what he means by “the wrong end of the curve” or the wrong axis. So by using the F of 0.485, the curve gives a much lower T of 2.2 K. Then 2.2 K should be highlighted.]

UX: Having an issue with date-time from server in another time zone

I am having a problem with time zones. My server is set up in America/Los Angeles, but I am working from Europe/Madrid, so there are 7 hours of difference. When I retrieve a date-time with a <triplat-ds> component, it comes with the Los Angeles time zone, but I need to compare it with the hours where I am. But obviously, it doesn’t work, because of the difference. This is a part of my HTML code…

I assumed that the startDate and endDate are defined as Date fields in the business object. I can reproduce the issue and I will open an issue to fix that. Meanwhile, you can force server-side filtering instead of filtering in the client side…

CTBUH announces 2016 Tall Building Award winners

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) has announced the winners and finalists of its CTBUH 2016 Tall Building Awards. This year’s winners and finalists, selected from 132 entries, have set a new bar for the annual awards program, with many employing inventive solutions that respond to demanding site constraints and prerogatives related to sustainability, seismicity, wind forces, mixed functionality, and a vibrant urban habitat.

Award recipients are recognized across five categories: Best Tall Building Awards – Regional (Americas, Asia & Australasia, Europe, and Middle East & Africa), Urban Habitat Award, Innovation Award, Performance Award, and 10 Year Award. All award winners will be recognized at the CTBUH 15th Annual Awards Symposium, which will take place at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, on November 3. At the event, the four regional Best Tall Building winners will compete for the title of Best Tall Building Worldwide.

Best Tall Building

The Best Tall Building category recognizes projects that have made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, and that achieve sustainability at the highest and broadest level. The winning projects exhibit processes and innovations that have added to the profession of design and enhance the cities and the lives of their inhabitants. The following Best Tall Buildings winners have been named for each of four competing regions in the world, from nominees representing a total of 27 countries…

ISS turns to IBM to transform management of 25,000 buildings

ISS, a leading global provider of facility services, has signed a commercial agreement with IBM to use the power of Watson IoT to transform the management of over 25,000 buildings around the world.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, ISS is one of the world’s largest private employers with over 500,000 staff managing everything from concierge to cleaning, catering to technical maintenance for thousands of high profile clients… ISS will tap IBM’s Watson IoT platform, consulting and advanced facilities management technologies to transform the services it provides to building owners and users around the world with the goal of making buildings more personalized, intuitive and user-friendly.

Working with IBM, ISS will integrate and analyse data from millions of devices and sensors embedded into buildings including doors, windows, chairs, meeting rooms, dispensers and air conditioning systems. Data will be uploaded onto IBM’s Watson IoT cloud platform and cognitive computing technologies will learn from this data helping ISS optimise its services as well as furthering its understanding of how people use buildings, thereby creating new opportunities for innovation…

As a first step, ISS has already fitted its Copenhagen headquarters, which serves as an innovation lab for the service group, with hundreds of sensors connected to IBM’s Watson IoT platform and TRIRIGA facilities management software to help improve room bookings and catering services for the 250 employees based in the building. The next phase will be the implementation of the cognitive IoT technology at selected customer sites…

[Admin: This post is related to the 06.30.16 post by Chris O’Connor about putting the human touch into buildings, and the 08.20.15 post about creating a connected 11-storey building in 4 hours. This post is also related to the 07.07.16 article by Engineering.com and the 07.07.16 article by Energy Manager Today.]

International Real Estate Data Exchange Council (IREDEC) formed

Five leading international data standards organizations, FIDJI (France), gif (Germany), INREV (Europe), OSCRE International (UK, North America), and REDEX (Netherlands) have formed the International Real Estate Data Exchange Council (IREDEC) and signed a collaborative agreement. The intent is to harmonize existing international data exchange standards to meet the requirements of investors, fund managers and service providers of cross border investments…

OSCRE is an international not for profit member-based organization focused on the collaborative development of real estate standards and their implementation around the world. The collaboration will begin with the development of a common data structure which will enable conversion between existing national and regional models. IREDEC will also engage in a validation phase of the methodology with international practitioners…

Based on a methodology of FIDJI, the potential savings of an implementation of an efficient data management approach in the European real estate industry could be more than 1 billion EUR per year. IREDEC encourages other organizations to join in their efforts to develop a common data structure for the real estate industry and to support implementation globally. For more information, please contact the Council via e-mail at iredec@oscre.org.

CFI: Leonard Bosman joins NGKF Global Corporate Services (GCS)

Newmark Grubb Knight Frank (NGKF) is pleased to announce that Leonard Bosman and other experienced IBM TRIRIGA professionals have joined NGKF Global Corporate Services (GCS). Bosman and his team are based in Hong Kong, further reinforcing the global reach of NGKF’s GCS platform. They will work closely with the NGKF’s European arm and the Computerized Facility Integration (CFI) TRIRIGA team…

Bosman is widely recognized as an industry pioneer, applying practical solutions for measuring software testability and inventing unique strategies for software certification methods. This innovative approach has helped to make him a recognizable player in the international market and to secure enterprise technology implementations for global organizations like Starbucks, Walgreens, American Express and McDonald’s.

Bosman’s repertoire includes real estate management, accounting, project management, facilities management, business strategies, process (re-)engineering, software/hardware, architecture/development and large-scale system implementations. He possesses a deep knowledge of IBM TRIRIGA, Planon, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft technologies, Java, WebLogic, WebSphere, BusinessObjects and more…

[Admin: This post is related to the 09.21.12 article by IFMA Hong Kong, and the 03.11.09 announcement by Tango Management Consulting.]

ValuD partners with MACS and expands services into Europe

ValuD Consulting, the leading full-service provider of IBM TRIRIGA solutions (www.valudconsulting.com), is pleased to announce that it has entered into a strategic partnership with MACS (www.macseu.co.uk), a leading Real Estate (RE) and Facilities Management (FM) consultancy in the European marketplace. The partnership will allow MACS and ValuD to more effectively meet the Real Estate and Facilities Management needs of companies in the United Kingdom and Continental Europe.

Through this partnership, ValuD Consulting and MACS will provide end-to-end IBM TRIRIGA and Maximo solutions to companies with significant Real Estate and Facilities Management holdings. MACS, which has experienced staff with skills in project management and business analysis of Real Estate and Facilities Management business processes, will leverage ValuD Consulting’s deep IBM TRIRIGA implementation, training and support expertise as well as using ValuD’s “FastStart” solutions. This “FastStart” approach will provide a proven and cost effective framework which will benefit companies that want to optimise their Real Estate, Capital Projects, Space Management, Facilities Management and Energy Management process through the use of the world’s leading RE and FM software solution – IBM TRIRIGA…

IBM opens Watson IoT global HQ and extends cognitive computing

IBM today announced the opening of its global headquarters for Watson Internet of Things (IoT), launching a series of new offerings, capabilities and ecosystem partners designed to extend the power of cognitive computing to the billions of connected devices, sensors and systems that comprise the IoT. These new offerings will be available through the IBM Watson IoT Cloud, the company’s global platform for IoT business and developers.

As part of today’s launch, the company announced that Munich, Germany will serve as the global headquarters for its new Watson IoT unit, as well as its first European Watson innovation center. The campus environment will bring together 1000 IBM developers, consultants, researchers and designers to drive deeper engagement with clients and partners, and will also serve as an innovation lab for data scientists, engineers and programmers building a new class of connected solutions at the intersection of cognitive computing and the IoT. The center will drive collaborative innovation with clients, partners and IBM researchers and data scientists to create new opportunities for growth in IoT. It represents IBM’s largest investment in Europe in more than two decades.

IBM also will deliver Watson APIs and services on the Watson IoT Cloud Platform to accelerate the development of cognitive IoT solutions and services, helping clients and partners make sense of the growing volume and variety of data in a physical world that is rapidly becoming digitized…

[Admin: This post is related to the 09.14.15 post about the new IBM IoT business unit.]

IoT: Creating a connected 11-storey building in 4 hours

Although the video doesn’t mention TRIRIGA, it reveals glimpses of TRIRIGA software in 5 separate shots. In the words of Nils J. van der Zijl, IBM IoT Europe: “We at IBM are uniquely positioned to transform this raw data into business insight, allowing you to make better, smarter, and faster decisions.”

Later, he adds: “The workplace of the future is driven by an enterprise asset, facility management, and workforce optimization solution.” In a nutshell, IBM TRIRIGA! It was nice to see the TRIRIGA name on the screen, but it would’ve been nicer to hear it too, haha. In any case, integrating TRIRIGA into IoT is pretty cool.