Part 1: How to navigate the smart buildings marketplace

Hey friends, 

For years, we’ve been trying to make the vendor swamp, AKA the smart buildings marketplace, less murky. 

We’ve been tracking the marketplace for many years and sharing insights with the Nexus Pro Community. We’ve taught over 400 students to ask the right questions to vendors in our Smart Building Strategist course. We’ve written and podcasted and interviewed dozens of buyers about this problem. 

To bring all of this content together, we’re kicking off a newsletter series on how to navigate the smart buildings marketplace. Today, we’ll start the series by describing the status quo. Then we’ll cover:

• The buyer’s homework—what you need to know before you engage the marketplace
• Thinking in categories—how to compare vendors apples to apples
• Thinking in layers—how to think about constructing your tech stack
• A case study and what we’re building

If you’re a buyer, this series contains our best advice on how to make sense of the marketplace. If you’re a vendor, this doubles as a way to explain what you do and stand out from the competition. 

Once we’re done, we’ll turn this into our latest free whitepaper. Let’s dive in!

Part 1: The pain for buyers (and sellers)

There are over 750 smart buildings vendors in our database. Within that group, the fragmentation is dizzying—there’s a different vendor for every problem. (And many for imaginary problems… but that’s a different newsletter.)

On their websites, there are so many acronyms and buzzwords you could play bingo. When you talk to vendors, many say they do far more than they’re actually qualified for. I won't mention names, but I just came across a vendor who claims to be 'your one-stop shop for digital operations'. Does that help you understand what they do? Me neither. 

Despite the fragmentation, vendors have overlapping capabilities and overlapping technology stacks. Telling them apart is also a huge lift—let alone assessing whether they fit what you’re looking for. 

The murkiness of the swamp isn’t abnormal—it’s simply a reflection of several confounding factors:

1. Where our industry sits on the adoption curve—Despite how long some of us have been doing this (cue the “I’ve been doing this for over 30 years” crowd), it’s still the early days. Most buildings have very little technology deployed.
2. How fragmented the buildings industry itself is—We don’t have one industry with one type of buyer, we have dozens across the different building types, ownership structures, and stakeholder types.
3. Hype and innovation cycles—Each new wave of technology advancement begets a new wave of startups built on that innovation.

Regardless, from the buyer’s perspective, the smart building technology marketplace needs more clarity for the technologies within it to cross the coveted chasm. 

Today, there aren’t any viable and scalable resources for wading through the vendor swamp. Google search results in apples-to-oranges comparisons. Consultants are vital in this process, but there aren’t enough of them and they’re too expensive for most of the market. Asking your peers is great, unless you’re ahead of them or until they hold back details because you’re their competition.

In our interviews with buyers, we’ve heard how this results in frustration and stagnation. Here are some quotes from them:

“Vendor research could be a full time job. But I have lots of other responsibilities on my plate.”

“I’ve learned that the vendor with the best search engine optimization (SEO) wasn’t necessarily the best at solving my problem.”

“We’ve wasted a lot of time and money going down the path with the wrong vendors.”

“There's no way to learn more info without signing up for a bombardment of biz dev calls and email follow ups.”

As a buyer, you need a strategy for how to engage with vendors. We’ll unpack that in the rest of this series. 

For now, let’s hear from you… does this resonate? What’s your strategy?

Reach out and let us know. 

—James and the Nexus Labs team