Solving the Smart Building Software Challenge

Sauter is a company based in Switzerland that manufactures market-leading hardware and software for monitoring, managing, and remotely controlling smart buildings worldwide. They produce devices capable of providing real-time data from building systems that deliver heating, ventilation, security, energy, water, and other utilities.

A few years ago, Sauter was facing several challenges:

• Their previous generation of building management systems made it difficult for both Sauter and their clients to configure and manage large installations with hundreds of devices.

• This earlier generation of systems was not suited to the new reality of interconnected and remote management.

• The user interface was also outdated and not designed to support new ways of working, making monitoring and management displays less effective and reducing performance.

Sauter needed a next-generation smart building management software system to maximize the utility of their new devices and handle the higher volumes of data produced by modern smart building systems.

Sauter selected us in 2009 as a software development partner, forming a joint venture called Verticalla. The goal was to build the next generation of Sauter’s smart building management applications—the Sauter Vision Center, which went live in 2012.

The platform provides building management functions such as alarm lists, data point lists, graphs, and reports, all of which can be personalized to enhance usability and value for clients. These features are built around a navigation system with rich visualizations.

Additional modules—such as the Energy Management Module, which enables energy use and production to be monitored and managed—allow the base solution to be customized according to client needs.

The Vision Center is now a groundbreaking smart building management product that combines the functionality of a traditional building management system with the accessibility of the internet and the openness of modern IoT systems.

More than 1,500 licenses have been sold worldwide across over 30 countries, and the platform now supports more than 10 languages.

A wide variety of commercial buildings use the application, including airports, stadiums, hotels, shopping centers, schools, hospitals, banks, ski resorts, and office buildings, as well as specialized industrial facilities such as pharmaceutical factories and nuclear power plants.

We are now excited to announce that we are exploring a new development with Sauter. We hope that the new Critical Software headquarters, currently being developed in the heart of Coimbra, Portugal, will become a “smart building” managed using the Sauter Vision Center application.