The Switch Platform: 3 ways to ingest data

A truly effective smart building platform should integrate building data, systems and equipment to give actionable insights into site and portfolio performance and ultimately help the people behind these assets drive efficiency, sustainability and comfort.

Our goal at Switch is to make it as easy and painless as possible to collect as much data as you want into one single pane of glass, for the very first time. Whether you have a brand new Class A office building, full of the latest IoT sensors, or an older retail shop with a few basic systems, we use three simple ways to connect your data, buildings and team:

1. The Switch appliance: Customers receive one appliance per building to connect and integrate existing HVAC, lighting and metering systems. This plug-and-play IoT appliance connects to the internet and your internal networks to communicate directly with your building subsystems, including your BMS and IoT sensors. Powering up your appliance begins your enterprise’s journey to monitor, analyze and optimize your building operations.
2. Data Mapping: Automatically feed data into the Switch Platform from sources like utility bills, work order systems and waste contractors via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or email, with a one-time configuration.
3. APIs: We've built a range of application program interfaces to enable integration with work order systems, utilities and other standalone platforms.

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How does the data ingestion process work?

First, Switch coordinates with your site team to arrange appliance and IP address set up, before deploying the appliances either on site or remotely. Switch then installs a few quick, easy plug-ins to connect the appliances to your building networks and powers them up. Finally, we discuss and plan any additional IoT sensor installation, and which data points to draw onto the Platform.

The benefits of integrating with Switch

Unlike other proprietary smart building solutions, Switch is ‘data agnostic,’ meaning the Platform doesn’t discriminate against any specific brand of IoT sensor or building system. From BMS systems to electrical meter data, utility usage work order systems or GRESB and LEED data, as long as the system we’re connecting to has an open-protocol or the data files are saved using standard file formats, we can connect to it. To extend the diverse range of smart building tech that the Platform integrates with, our software development team is at the ready to develop new API integrations for our Enterprise IoT customers.

Moreover, integrating the Switch Platform is a very scalable process – once we establish the specifics of integrating thousands of devices with diverse firmware, software and hardware types, extending the Platform across your portfolio later is easy, whether that means 100, 1,000 or 100,000 additional buildings.