Honeywell, SAP Launch Forge Connected Building Offering

Co-developed with SAP, the new Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations offering can help property owners and managers optimize their real estate operations to meet sustainability goals and right-size office space as more employers embrace flexible work policies.

Honeywell and SAP are launching a new offering for connected buildings that can help property owners and managers optimize their real estate operations to meet sustainability goals and right-size office space as more employers embrace flexible work policies.

Launched Wednesday, the new cloud-based offering is called Honeywell Forge Real Estate Operations, and it’s meant to help building owners and managers make better decisions about their real estate holdings by aggregating and analyzing the financial, employee and real estate data from SAP systems as well as sensor and building data from Honeywell’s Forge IoT platform.

[Related: Zededa Wants To Make Edge Computing Open And Future-Proof — With Or Without It]

Ginger Smith, director of strategic partnerships in Honeywell’s Connected Enterprise division, told CRN that there is a greater need for an offering like Forge Real Estate Operations because many employers have started to adopt flexible work policies as a result of the pandemic.

“Regardless of how many people are coming in, you’re going to have to operate your real estate portfolio, and so tools like this, they help you make it as efficient as possible,” she said.

Forge Real Estate Operations was built on top of SAP Analytics Cloud and takes in building system and sensor data from Honeywell’s Forge platform to provide property managers and owners with insight into several areas: operational readiness, occupant safety, sustainability, financial intelligence, occupant experience and occupant utilization.

Smith said Forge Real Estate Operations can be used not just to drive cost savings for buildings but also to identify new revenue-driving opportunities because of how it can let users compare the occupancy, utilization and costs of different buildings in a portfolio.

“Tools like this give you the visibility so you can right-size, make the right decisions, put leases in the right spaces and put people in the right floors,” she said.

Forge Real Estate Operations can address another area that has become critical during the pandemic: occupant safety. This can include monitoring room capacity. It can also include using humidity and temperature sensors to measure and analyze indoor air quality, which can give builder owners and managers the insight they need to adjust their HVAC systems to mitigate the spread of airborne illnesses, according to Smith.

One of the major benefits of Forge Real Estate Operations is that it can be deployed in six to 10 weeks, which is significantly faster than the 18 to 24 months it would take for systems integrators to deploy a do-it-yourself solution, Smith said.

Channel partners are “essential” to Honeywell’s go-to-market strategy for the Forge platform, but for Forge Real Estate Operations, the company is starting by focusing on co-selling initiatives with NTT Data Services and another global systems integrator, according to Smith. The company is also working with a short list of other partners for sales and integration.

Amy Oster, vice president, manufacturing, NTT DATA Services, told CRN that NTT’s co-sell partnership with Honeywell for Forge Real Estate Operations marks an evolution beyond the company’s standard systems integration partnership it has previously had with the industrial giant as part of a 20-plus-year relationship.

“It’s a natural combination where there’s no sales channel conflict,” she said. “It’s just a natural pairing of two [companies] that easily complement each other based on a 20-year history, so it’s just an ease of doing business with each other.”

Oster said the new offering from Honeywell and SAP opens up opportunities for NTT to extend its advisory services for supply chain and financial management.

“From our perspective, the [Forge Real Estate Operations] play is an opportunity for us not just to partner from an IoT and a [Forge Real Estate Operations] perspective, but also then to provide and offer up our larger breadth of SAP advisory spaces,” Oster said.