6 | Thursday 5 February | ISE Daily 2026
The smart building system is broken By Adrian Pennington
“We may never see another smart building because the system is broken,” declared Pete Coman, principal, NV5, at the Smart Building Summit. “The system is wrecked,” added Kevin Brownell, director, Nu Xform, who was among the panel of experts discussing how integration enables value in smart buildings. They agreed that the array of data gathered from smart building systems is not being utilised anywhere near its maximum impact. “The biggest benefit of intelligent integration is to break down silos of data; silos still mean someone is losing out,” said Brownell. “I’ve been coming to the ISE Smart Building Summit for a decade and we continue to talk about silos. Nothing’s changed.” Antiquated facilities management contracts are part of the problem. “The contracts themselves don’t have flexibility to allow for data sharing or for innovation,” said Tomas Mac Eoin, CEO at contractor Hereworks. “A client will say they are open to promoting the wellbeing of occupants and improving the human experience but in reality, outmoded contracts are designed to squeeze the most efficiencies. Change is fundamental if we’re to derive real value from the work that we all do.”
(L-R): Pete Coman, Mike Brooman, Kevin Brownell, Danny Venturelli and Tomas Mac Eoin
“Facilities teams might have 12,000 data points and no idea what it means,” said Mike Brooman, smart buildings director at Vanti. “Integration is always greater than individual parts, but unless you have someone driving the vision you will have an entire supply chain of people watering it down.” The panel urged customers to begin smart building design before there’s even a hole in the ground.
“A lot of the time clients want a smart building developed but they don’t have a clue what a smart building is,” said Danny Venturelli, head of customer success, Smart Spaces Global. “They just want to say they’ve got a smart building but there’s no specification, no scope. If you want to halve your energy costs post-occupancy then you need someone like a Master Systems Integrator at the very start of the design process.”
AI manages data deluge in control rooms By Monica Heck Those who assume there is not much happening in the control room space would be gravely mistaken, according to Mike Sullivan-Trainor, senior industry analyst at AVIXA. Speaking at the Control Rooms Summit, he noted that the sector is expected to show fairly strong growth over the next five years. “The command and control market is expected to reach $22 billion in 2030, growing from $18 billion in 2018,” he shared. “There are a number of factors responsible for this, including the data deluge that we are currently experiencing. There are more endpoints to be brought in no matter the type of control room. The advent of IoT means more end devices supplying data, and more
AVIXA's Mike Sullivan-Trainor shared the latest industry analysis for the control rooms sector
richness to the data and analytics being applied to it. A layer of AI processing adds to the challenge.” There has never been more data for the control room to parse,
analyse and manage, according to Sullivan-Trainor. “This has implications on how you kit the control room out." Endpoint vulnerability, lack
of operator training and AI automation also mean that cybersecurity is a hot topic in this space. AI automation in particular raises questions, such as how much freedom to give AI in terms of taking or recommending actions, he said. Worldwide, APAC remains the largest investor in this space, ahead of the Americas, with an expected spend of $9 billion by 2030, driven by China. “There has been a recent strong push in the Middle East and Africa, driven by Gulf Cooperation Council countries as they implement more digital infrastructure and see control rooms as a valuable part of their investment,” said SullivanTrainor. “Investment in military developments in Europe are going to increase the importance of control rooms in the region, too.”
Join the #ISE2026 conversation on social