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To Future-Proof Two Medical Buildings for 25 Years, Altura and McCarthy Skipped Supervisory Controllers and Ran IP to Every Device
Altura and McCarthy modernized the building automation in two occupied medical office buildings, and the defining move was to run the new system with no supervisory controllers. Altura served as the master systems integrator and commissioning agent on the projects; McCarthy was the controls contractor responsible for the field controls.
Both buildings ran a frankensteined mix of legacy OEM controls of varying vintages, the kind of stack most operators inherit rather than design. The owner's enterprise standard called for an open, hardware-agnostic BAS built on Tridium Niagara, and the team delivered it by running IP straight to every device, with nothing sitting between the front end and the field.
Avoiding supervisory controllers is, in this approach, a way to extend the longevity of the automation system. The IP backbone is built to last 25 to 30 years, with no proprietary controller layer to age out or lock the owner into a single vendor. New technology plugs in as it arrives, and the BAS stays multi-vendor by design.
The owner scales this by enforcing standardization. Its standard carries templates, a consistent data ontology, and naming conventions, so each field controller does one simple, repeatable job with little custom programming and little peer-to-peer reliance. That consistency is what lets the team change things across the whole portfolio at once. Adding demand management on top of existing efficiency programs becomes a configuration change, not a re-wire.
Renewing BAS infrastructure in 2026 starts with avoiding lock-in through the hardware you select and simplifying the path from sensor to cloud. In buildings that can never go offline, that is the difference between an upgrade that lasts and one you repeat in a decade.
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Altura and McCarthy modernized the building automation in two occupied medical office buildings, and the defining move was to run the new system with no supervisory controllers. Altura served as the master systems integrator and commissioning agent on the projects; McCarthy was the controls contractor responsible for the field controls.
Both buildings ran a frankensteined mix of legacy OEM controls of varying vintages, the kind of stack most operators inherit rather than design. The owner's enterprise standard called for an open, hardware-agnostic BAS built on Tridium Niagara, and the team delivered it by running IP straight to every device, with nothing sitting between the front end and the field.
Avoiding supervisory controllers is, in this approach, a way to extend the longevity of the automation system. The IP backbone is built to last 25 to 30 years, with no proprietary controller layer to age out or lock the owner into a single vendor. New technology plugs in as it arrives, and the BAS stays multi-vendor by design.
The owner scales this by enforcing standardization. Its standard carries templates, a consistent data ontology, and naming conventions, so each field controller does one simple, repeatable job with little custom programming and little peer-to-peer reliance. That consistency is what lets the team change things across the whole portfolio at once. Adding demand management on top of existing efficiency programs becomes a configuration change, not a re-wire.
Renewing BAS infrastructure in 2026 starts with avoiding lock-in through the hardware you select and simplifying the path from sensor to cloud. In buildings that can never go offline, that is the difference between an upgrade that lasts and one you repeat in a decade.
Register for the next Nexus Labs event.
Sign up for the newsletter to get 5 stories like this per week:
This is a great piece!
I agree.