Watch: David Trice on how Honeywell aims to make commercial buildings smarter

As IoT (internet of things) and other smart technologies become all pervasive in our day-to-day lives, no sector will remain immune to transformation led by technology. The commercial real estate sector is no exception and the future may lie in self-operating autonomous buildings.

“A lot of smart building projects that you've heard about often times focus on a single building, and there's a tremendous amount of benefit derived as a result. What we're trying to do is identify these basic needs out of that project and apply these basic needs across hundreds or perhaps even thousands of buildings,” David Trice, vice president and general manager at Honeywell Connected Buildings, said during an interaction with TechCircle in Bengaluru recently.

Trice also spoke about the evolution of the real estate sector over the years, co-working spaces and data privacy concerns surrounding connected buildings.

In June this year, Honeywell International, the Charlotte, North Carolina based technology and manufacturing conglomerate, launched an industrial IoT analytics platform called Honeywell Forge, a software solutions suite that converts operational data collected from enterprises into actionable insights. 

The real estate sector in India is expected to achieve a market size of $1 trillion by 2030 from $120 billion in 2017 and is also poised to contribute to 13 % of the country’s gross domestic product by 2025, according to India Brand Equity Foundation. The office market space in the country crossed the 600 million square feet milestone in the first six months of 2019, with Bengaluru, Mumbai and the National Capital Region (NCR) being the top three markets, according to estimates by global realtors CBRE. Office leasing crossed 30 million square feet during the same period with Bengaluru, Hyderabad, NCR and Mumbai accounting for about 80 percent of the market.

The majority of commercial real estate owners have multiple disconnected systems in each building. The lack of communication and compatibility amongst these systems lead to manual maintenance, data trapped in proprietary systems, disconnected teams and systems, over or underutilized space, and poor occupant experience.

When fully deployed, Honeywell Forge for Buildings aims to help reduce the operating expense of a building portfolio by up to 25 percent by providing visibility, monitoring and control of all building systems and processes across an entire portfolio of buildings. The cloud-based software aims to transform the way a variety of companies in India collect, analyze and act on data by optimizing their enterprise on a single screen using advanced data analytics. 

With a presence spanning over eight decades in India, Honeywell has three manufacturing, engineering operations, and five global centres for technology development and innovation.