Grant Gross
Senior Writer

IBM releases Intelligent Building Management software

news
Jun 9, 20112 mins

The new software is designed to reduce energy costs by monitoring building sensors

IBM has released new software designed to cut energy costs by monitoring sensors inside of large buildings and flagging potential maintenance issues.

IBM’s Intelligent Building Management software is designed to collect data from sensors and building control systems from companies including Johnson Controls and Schneider Electric, the company said. Some large buildings have 80,000 points of data that the software can access, leading to millions of data points a week, IBM said.

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The software is designed to monitor “every valve, thermostat, light switch,” flow rates on heating and air conditioning systems and water systems, IBM said.

“Until now, organizations have been looking in their rear-view mirror to reduce their buildings’ energy use,” David Bartlett, vice president of IBM’s smarter buildings division, said in a statement. “IBM sees a tremendous opportunity to help organizations listen to and make sense of a building’s operations by applying a real-time, analytic approach.”

Buildings consume 42 percent of all energy worldwide, and energy costs represent about 30 percent of a building’s cost, IBM said.

The Tulane University School of Architecture in New Orleans and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have adopted the software, IBM said. The museum is using the software to monitor climatic conditions that affect artwork in its medieval branch, IBM said.

Grant Gross

Grant Gross, a senior writer at CIO, is a long-time IT journalist who has focused on AI, enterprise technology, and tech policy. He previously served as Washington, D.C., correspondent and later senior editor at IDG News Service. Earlier in his career, he was managing editor at Linux.com and news editor at tech careers site Techies.com. As a tech policy expert, he has appeared on C-SPAN and the giant NTN24 Spanish-language cable news network. In the distant past, he worked as a reporter and editor at newspapers in Minnesota and the Dakotas. A finalist for Best Range of Work by a Single Author for both the Eddie Awards and the Neal Awards, Grant was recently recognized with an ASBPE Regional Silver award for his article “Agentic AI: Decisive, operational AI arrives in business.”

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