Networked Enterprise Featured Article

The Internet of Things is much talked about when it comes to sensors on things such as industrial equipment and machines in the field. Less talked about is how it can be used to drive energy efficiency within office buildings.

Numbers vary wildly when it comes to smart building technology, but they are uniformly positive. If you just take the building energy management market, Navigant Research estimates that it will grow from $2.4 billion this year to $10.8 billion by 2024, a fivefold increase. Taking a more holistic perspective, IDC (News - Alert) Energy Insights says the market was $6.3 billion last year, and will reach $17.4 billion by 2019.

Either way, smart building technology is hot—and, with good reason.

Smart buildings can bring dramatic cost savings, especially for government buildings where there often is less focus on energy efficiency. By linking building lighting and climate controls to the cloud via smart building technology, public buildings can substantially cut down on wasted heating and cooling of empty rooms, and of lighting that is left on for no good reason.

Both the cost and the environmental savings from such technology represent a dramatic improvement over current systems and should represent a minor revolution in terms of how buildings consume energy.

One company that seeing the opportunity and is working on making it a reality is the cloud services firm, Lucid. It has developed a cloud service called BuildingOS, which analyzes data from more than 160 hardware and software building technologies to drive better building management.

Others such as Siemens (News - Alert) and Intel also are working on systems to support the smart building market.

“Building energy management systems (BEMS) represent an important evolutionary step in the approach to facilities and operations management,” said Casey Talon, senior analyst for Navigant Research. “As the market matures, more integrated and sophisticated BEMS solutions are delivering energy efficiency improvements while also enabling comprehensive business intelligence and strategic management.”