Workplace Systems Integration Market Heats Up With CBRE’s Acquisition Of Buildingi

Workplace Systems Integration Market Heats Up With CBRE’s Acquisition Of Buildingi

On January 5, 2022 CBRE announced that it had acquired Buildingi, a provider of occupancy planning and technology services in the workplace systems integration market. CBRE plans to incorporate Buildingi into its existing Occupancy Management team. Specifically, it will leverage Buildingi’s shared service centre in Costa Rica to strengthen the support provided through existing centres in Europe and Asia to deliver 24/7 occupancy planning services such as technical drawing, spatial data management, work order processing and test fit support. Buildingi also offers services for deploying IWMS, CAD, BIM and Office 365 services.

What is the rationale behind this purchase? The rapid rise of agile working and adaptive workplaces is driving demand for more sophisticated occupancy management services. As corporates shift their offices to fit the needs of the hybrid working era, there is more urgent demand for services that update records on floorplans and interior designs. Of the local system integrators operating in the North American market, Buildingi stands out for its commitment to occupancy planning services, covering the design, as well as layout and data labelling update processes. They have multiple decades of experience working on hundreds of IWMS projects, for example, in conjunction with CAD and BIM data updates.

CBRE can leverage Buildingi’s services to better meet demand from their large corporate clients to iterate their workplace layouts, and by doing so make themselves valuable for clients’ long term strategic goals. For example, instead of going through a workplace transformation project every ten years or so, corporates are now opting to continuously iterate workplace layouts to meet fluctuating occupancy levels every quarter. A sign of this growing interest can be found in the fact that corporates are investing in new technology to improve their monitoring and management of occupancy trends (see figure below). Thirty four percent of firms are evaluating or trialling near-real time occupancy sensors, the second highest of the technologies surveyed (behind energy meters). CBRE’s acquisition of Buildingi positions it well to serve corporates’ rapidly evolving requirements for hybrid era occupancy planning.

To learn more about this exciting and dynamic market, read our latest report published this month, Best Practices: Engaging A Systems Integrator To Drive Value From Your IWMS.