Cloud Hosting

As the country slowly reopens, life for Americans will take on myriad wrinkles perhaps none more so than through corporate real estate.

Safety issues in a COVID-19 world will require significant changes at offices, hospitals, hotels and other venues via up-to-the-minute data.

Two significant cloud-computing companies are working to make it happen. Honeywell International Inc. HON, +0.74% and SAP SAP, +0.49% on Thursday announced they are teaming on a joint cloud-based solution combining technologies to streamline business operations based on data, starting with commercial real estate.

Returning to work offers a tantalizing challenge, as millions of people will need to navigate elevators, bathrooms, kitchens and desk space. Office managers, in turn, are poring over data from different sources to drive cost-reduction and elimination of waste in terms of energy consumption and other resources, Que Dallara, chief executive of Honeywell Connected Enterprise, told MarketWatch in a phone interview Tuesday.

For example, one potential customer, Transwestern the nations largest privately held real-estate company owns and manages office buildings through 34 offices in the U.S. Its task is onerous: As some employees return to offices it oversees in Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta and Houston, it must calculate changes in cleaning, lighting, temperature, air circulation and social distancing.

There is definitely a giant bucket of things to consider, Kevin Boltz, national director of engineering, asset services, at Transwestern, told MarketWatch. Plus, we must manage data from sources such as local and state health officials and the [World Health Organization], as well as consider so much technology on the market.

See also: Honeywells latest pivot is into quantum computing

Ultimately, it decided on a cloud-based system, which is where Honeywell-SAP come in, according to Boltz. It affords additional flexibility in security, building automation and energy efficiency.

Analysts briefed on the Honeywell-SAP partnership believe it could establish a new baseline as building owners and tenants grapple with a whole new dynamic.

I think it is especially important in the current environment that tenants and real-estate owners together have confidence in the quality of the experience in their offices, and through this partnership they can now be more confident in what that experience is, Scott Morey of One11 Advisors told MarketWatch in an email Wednesday.

Honeywells partnership with SAP is part of a dramatic pivot to an industrial-software company that has drawn comparisons to the business models of Salesforce.com Inc. CRM, +1.77% and SAP, while bolstering Honeywells bottom line and stock price.

As its hundreds of customers migrate to the Industrial Internet of Things, or IIoT, to connect everything to the internet, Honeywell is accelerating its software efforts to capture a slice of the multibillion-dollar market. Its software is used to enhance output, cut maintenance costs and improve reliability.

See the original post here:
Honeywell, SAP are teaming in the cloud to remake commercial real estate in the age of COVID-19 - MarketWatch