Yesterday building management software Aquicore announced its purchase of analytics platform Entic. The move seems very much in line with Aquicore’s vision to be “the single platform of commercial real estate operations.” Collecting the data is just the first step, the real value comes in being able to leverage it in order to save money for building owners and managers. One of the fundamentals of B2B sales has always been that the easiest way to make money it to help someone else save it.
Aquicore founder and CEO Logan Soya is a regular contributor to our publication so I reached out to him to get a better idea of the direction his company. One of the things that has helped Aquicore grow to the size it is today has been its use of self-installing hardware. The ability for management teams to be able to plug-in Aquicore’s sophisticated, connected devices without having to pay specialized contractors make it an easy choice for buildings of all types and uses. But Entic has its own set of sensors that do require expert installation. When I asked Logan about how he planned to merge the two philosophies he said, “We will always focus on delivering value to our customers in the fastest ways possible. Entic’s BMS integration technology similarly focuses on quick integration and we see a clear opportunity to bundle their BMS connectivity technology into Aquicore’s fast, self-installation approach to allow us to go deeper into building systems.”
Becoming an all-in-one building software means being pulled in a lot of directions. Logan told me that he works closely with his customer base of property managers, building engineers, corporate workplace executives and service partners to pick which processes to improve. When I asked him what other services he is looking to integrate he told me, “We see a big opportunity in the market to continue to more closely tie the budgetary and financial workflows within CRE back to day-to-day operations. With the information we are collecting, there is an opportunity to vastly improve the way budgets are discovered, implemented, and measured against and be able to more precisely track the impact of operational improvements to give credit where credit is due.”
When it comes to building operations today, many operators find themselves having to stitch together dozens of different applications. This won’t be the case forever. Winners will emerge from the growing building software field that will be able to complete every task needed by those who manage buildings. With a lot of space being serviced by its platform (250 million), a long list of deep-pocketed investors and a number of very high profile users, Aquicore might be one of the frontrunners in the race to be the first one-stop building software.
