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Solving the Smart Building Software Challenge
Smart buildings are constantly evolving, which proved to be a challenge for Swiss manufacturer Sauter. Learn how Critical Software worked with Sauter to create the Vision Center, combining building management systems with state-of-the-art Internet of Things capabilities.
Sauter is a company based in Switzerland which manufactures market-leading hardware and software for monitoring, managing and remotely controlling smart buildings across the world. They produce devices capable of providing real-time data from building systems that provide heating, ventilation, security, energy, water and other utilities.
The Challenges
A few years ago, Sauter was facing a few challenges:
- Their previous generation of building management systems made it difficult for Sauter and their clients to configure for the management of large installations with hundreds of devices.
- This previous generation of systems was not suited for the new reality of interconnected and remote management.
- The user interface was also dated and not designed to deal with new ways of working, so monitoring and management displays became less effective and performance degraded.
Sauter needed a next-generation smart-building management software system to maximise the utility of their new smart building devices and the higher volumes of data now produced by smart building systems.
The Vision Center
Sauter selected us in 2009 as a software development partner, creating 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.
It provides building management functions such as alarm lists or data point lists, graphs and reports which can be personalised to increase their capacity and utility to the client, all built around a navigation system with rich visualisations.
Many additional modules, such as the Energy Management Module (which enables the energy use and production to be monitored and managed), allow the base solution to be personalised by the client as required.
The Vision Center is now a ground-breaking, smart building management product that combines the functions of a building management system with the portability of the internet and the openness of modern IoT systems.
Over 1500 licenses have been sold worldwide in over 30 countries and more than 10 languages are now supported.
A huge variety of commercial buildings are using the application, such as airports, stadiums, hotels, shopping centres, schools, hospitals, banks, ski resorts and office buildings, as well as some specialised industrial buildings - such as pharmaceutical factories and nuclear power plants.
A Project Close to Our Heart
We are now excited to announce that we are discussing an exciting development with Sauter – we are hoping that the new Critical Software headquarters, being developed in the heart of the city of Coimbra in Portugal, will be a “smart building” and will be managed using the Sauter Vision Center application.