A technology/convergence success story that was much discussed, implemented ten years ago and is now online. Bill Jacobs discuss their program to IP enable all digital, video and access controls across the networks to globally manage 440 locations and 17.5 million SF. Through centralized operation centers, the company saves $10 million/year on a recurring revenue basis. This has implemented greater business continuity and security applications. A peek at the future is also discussed.

As leaders in the business, ASP discusses how they are taking a holistic view of what is happening in the marketplace: oil crisis, energy and electric increases, etc. and proactively addressing these issues. With their smart buildings, they are working on creating awareness in corporate America to find smarter ways to work and run their businesses while balancing what is good for the environment.

With standards and technology changing, Henry Chamberlain discusses interoperability as the greatest change affecting the industry. It has certainly transformed the way they do business in regards to efficiency and relevancy. In ten years, he predicts that all operational information will be on somebody’s fingertips which will make the industry more effective and drive asset values.

Sheldon Pfeifer is seeing a couple of forces driving large industry trends today. He sees a focus and demand on operations software innovations to squeeze out efficiencies. The other is regulatory compliance including green building initiatives. Oracle offers a wide variety of products, but what’s next are solutions to manage of front lease end transactions from marketing to closing deals, document management automation and others.

In keeping with the conference day’s discussion on the merging of innovation and real estate, this is a dialogue with how GE Asset Management is working with their building partners to focus on the integration and intersection of technology. They are placing infrastructures on building systems that communicate to each other. Examples on how technology is applied to efficiently operate their buildings are cited.

A discussion on the acceleration of transactions of commercial properties online. It is currently at phase where contingent offers are already online but still facing the largest barrier of the actual physical inspection of the properties. As more information comes online, the ability increases to provide actionable items to get to a decision-making point (i.e. make an offer).

An exciting discussion into what OSCRE is working on now and what’s to come. For the past ten years, they have been working on standards for commercial information exchange which is moving property listings exchanged between various parties to make it easier to acquire and process information. This is now released and will be implemented by CBRE. Others in the works are space classification, GL locations, real property unique identifier standards, among others.

In regards to standards in data management, it will mean a tremendous amount for their membership. They get a lot of pressure from the regulators, rating agencies and clients to respond to them more efficiently. By adopting OSCRE standards, it will allow them to be more responsive, efficient., save time and money. Adoption rate is an increased awareness hat this is going to be a requirement.

OSCRE was started out of the commercial real estate sector based on the need to expand thee role of technology serving companies or service firms. A lot of progress was going to be needed and they recognized that standards was the oil to get the machine going. OSCRE focuses on best operations systems for the business, best practices, information management and technical standards. Its goal is to get the industry up to the 21st century standards.

The future technology standards is in the integrated workplace management systems space. The ability to integrate data sets and elements across the workplace landscape is where we are going, but the industry will not go there without standards. These can be implemented through: collaboration with OSCRE, dialogue with vendors to support and embrace itand evangelizing it to user groups.