The Cloud Platform Becomes a Standard Trade in Technical Building Equipment

Modern buildings are expected to perform better than ever before. Owners and operators face pressure to reduce operating costs, ensure user satisfaction, comply with regulatory requirements, and remain resilient to market changes. At the same time, the energy transition is fundamentally changing the requirements: buildings must actively become part of the energy system, respond flexibly to price signals, integrate renewable energies, intelligently control their systems, and even act as energy storage units.

This creates a new core requirement: buildings need a digital infrastructure that helps orchestrate all these tasks – the cloud platform as the standard trade of Technical Building Equipment (TBE). It becomes the digital foundation that enables efficiency, sustainability, grid serviceability, and thus long‑term value stability.

Requirements to Modern Buildings

Efficient Use and High‑Quality Spaces

Flexible space utilization and improved occupant comfort are becoming increasingly important. Information on actual space usage creates transparency for leasing, alternative usage concepts, or demand‑based services. The value contributions of a property include comfort, indoor air quality, hygienically safe hot water, and additional energy services such as process heat or cooling (for example, for sterilization in hospitals or food refrigeration) and supply security within the technical infrastructure.

Increase Revenue, Reduce Costs

At the same time, efforts must be made to reduce the resources required to achieve the benefits described above. This particularly concerns energy consumption as well as the personnel and materials needed to operate the property. Facility Management plays a key role: digital methods such as predictive maintenance, digital work order processes and checklists, automated analyses, and advanced control algorithms increase efficiency and the verifiability of delivered services.

Equally important is the technical optimization of the building’s energy systems. This requires the ability to flexibly adapt operations based on automated and scalable analyses as well as advanced control algorithms to weather forecasts, usage data, and (becoming increasingly relevant) dynamic electricity tariffs.

Sustainability Becomes an Economic Imperative

Reducing total primary energy demand directly contributes to the sustainability of a portfolio. Rising CO₂ prices and potential sanctions for high emission assets emphasize the economic relevance. Regulations for energy efficient operation through building automation and digital energy monitoring, such as Article 13 of the EU Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD) and the resulting national legislation, e.g., § 71a of the German Buildings Energy Act (GEG) or France’s Décret BACS, require buildings to operate in an automated, digitally documented, and energy efficient manner.

As a result, the market is shifting from “Manage to Green” to “Manage to Digital.” The digital intelligence of buildings, also known as Smart Building Readiness, expressed through the Smart Readiness Indicator, is increasingly seen as a key criterion for future proof portfolios. The future viability of properties is primarily determined by connectivity and the availability of required interfaces throughout the digital building ecosystem.

Grid Serviceability Becomes a Key Resource

The energy transition represents a paradigm shift: generation no longer follows consumption; instead, consumption increasingly follows supply. Renewable energies are volatile. Buildings must therefore be able to:

• shift their consumption, e.g., through Demand Side Management,
• respond to price signals,
• strategically use self‑generation and storage,
• temporarily store energy intelligently over time.

This turns buildings into dynamic participants in the energy system. Their grid serviceability will directly influence future energy costs, CO₂ emissions, and competitiveness.

Generative AI Fundamentally Transforms Building Operations

In addition to traditional AI control algorithms, generative AI is increasingly entering technical building operations. By not only analyzing existing information but also generating new content and solutions from it in combination with spontaneous inputs, it creates entirely new possibilities within buildings, such as:

• automated understanding of complex interrelationships,
• contextual combination of data, documentation, and operational logs,
• rapid fault diagnostics and optimization suggestions in real time via chat.

Generative AI thus becomes a digital assistant, particularly for asset managers, facility managers, and technical operators.

Why Standalone Solutions Are Not Enough

The examples show that the value stability of real estate can only be enhanced through a holistic consideration of the aspects mentioned above. Today’s market offers a wide range of standalone solutions from established companies, corporate spin‑offs, proven PropTechs, and young start‑ups. Here are some examples, without claiming completeness:

• retrofit sensors and space utilization analyses with corresponding heat mapping,
• software for building performance assessment,
• traditional building automation systems to monitor operational behavior and draw conclusions about thermal comfort and well‑being,
• digital FM services such as cleaning on demand or condition‑based maintenance of HVAC systems,
• energy optimization services, partly within a savings contracting model,
• AI‑based, weather‑predictive controls and self‑learning algorithms for automated continuous optimization,
• ESG software for achieving and reporting environmental, social, and governance objectives,
• smart building and smart district apps offering various services, including access, lockers, people finder, room and workspace booking, incident management, and much more.

Many of these solutions address individual requirements, but mostly as standalone systems. They promise relief for specific needs, yet since a smart building is often individually planned, the result is again a singular system that is hardly scalable. For owners with heterogeneous real estate portfolios, this is a major disadvantage. To cover the variety of requirements holistically, a unifying technical trade is needed. But what exactly is this required trade that brings everything together? How is it technically designed? Is it part of the Building Services Engineering (TGA)? And can it be connected externally to a building?

The Cloud Platform as the Standard Trade

From a technical perspective, this trade can best be defined as a cloud platform for buildings. It should be understood as a standard trade of the TBE and be considered both in new construction and existing buildings.

The Foundation: A Solid Data Basis

The data treasure of a building is of particular importance, as all the use cases outlined above require it to varying degrees. Data is considered the oil of the 21st century. It must be refined (collected and translated into actions) to generate added value. This is achieved partly through the platform’s own functions and partly through services from other providers that can access the data via existing interfaces.

Technical Design: How Trades Are Integrated into the Cloud Platform

1. Data Collection, Data Lake, and Digital Twin

The core function is initially data collection and storage in the form of a so‑called “data lake.” It contains all technical operational, traffic, and movement data generated by the TBE. In addition, all relevant master and metadata about the property should be stored in a structured manner. It must also be possible to receive, structure, and make available relevant documents – such as as‑built drawings, manufacturer and maintenance documents, and contracts – to the respective stakeholders.

Based on a semantic structuring of all these data, a digital twin of a property and the entire portfolio is created, representing both physical components and processes. It can consist of various components of physical or process-related origin and thus digitally replicate reality. For example, components of the TBE and maintenance processes can be modeled within the digital twin.

2. Open Interfaces and Stakeholder Access

Another key function of the cloud platform for buildings is to provide targeted access to selected data for all stakeholders while ensuring full data protection and information security. Analysis and control algorithms as well as process engines expand the functional scope. Open interfaces enable data exchange between individual trades, while external data is integrated via so called APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). While platform internal GenAI applications can use building specific data securely and in compliance with data protection via retrieval augmented generation frameworks, this can also be implemented efficiently and effectively for company owned GenAI platforms via Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers. All this is a prerequisite for external providers to integrate their own GenAI and LLM services.

3. Integration of Additional Trades

Various “connectivity features” serve as the integration layer. In new buildings and many commercial existing buildings, large parts of the TBE are already pre integrated through building automation. For cost reasons, not all trades are integrated in most cases. Accordingly, additional trades must be integrated locally. This can be done via IP based integration using so called Edge Devices (small industrial PCs) integrated into the building and connected to its technical network.

If a building lacks the necessary technical capabilities, its existing systems can be retrofitted using gateways. If the existing technology is too old, additional sensors can be installed as part of a technical retrofit tailored to specific use cases – a rapidly evolving market. In any case, this approach makes it possible to capture almost all systems quickly and cost effectively in a cloud platform today.

Cloud Instead of Local: Why the Cloud Is Needed as a Central Data Hub

Since owners, asset managers, and facility managers usually manage entire portfolios rather than just one building, overall transparency is crucial. The right place for data and interface functions is therefore the cloud as a central data hub – provided that data protection and information security are professionally implemented. In our experience, local deployments do not offer comparable scalability advantages. Since the best data refinement is always achieved through specialized algorithms, there will never be a single platform that combines all optimal functions. The future therefore lies in cloud to cloud architectures or platform of platforms topologies, where different platforms collaborate via APIs. In our diagram, this is illustrated by the point “Third Party Platforms and Digital Services.”

Use by All Relevant Stakeholders

A suitable cloud platform can be used directly by all relevant stakeholders via user interfaces such as web frontends or apps. User‑side business intelligence solutions can be connected via interfaces. Alternatively, third‑party platforms can access the functions and offer their own services and interfaces. The platform thus becomes the central digital foundation for planners, operators, owners, and service providers throughout the entire life cycle of a property.