Smart building software: run your building sensor by sensor, room by room

Smart building software (Building Management System, or BMS) supervises a building's equipment and sensors in real time. Historically the market is dominated by heavyweight platforms — Tridium Niagara, Schneider EcoStruxure, Honeywell EBI — that require a certified integrator, a multi-month deployment, and a six-figure budget.

The new generation of cloud-native smart building software, including Sensia, changes the equation. No integrator: Sensia commissions the connection to your building, you structure your portfolio, and meaningful alerts arrive as soon as measurements come through. The IoT layer supports modern protocols (LoRaWAN, Zigbee, MQTT) on top of legacy BACnet. The analytics layer embeds AI natively to anticipate failures instead of reacting to them.

Sensia is built around three complementary pillars.

Sensor-level IoT supervision. Import your LoRaWAN sensors (Dragino, Decentlab, Adeunis, Milesight), Zigbee sensors (Aqara, Sonoff, Ikea Tradfri via Zigbee2MQTT), or generic MQTT. Auto-discovery happens on the first uplink — no manual configuration. The device profile catalogue covers 300+ models with their physical ranges, units, IPSO mappings and typical cadences. If your sensor is unknown, an AI classifier auto-enriches the catalogue in 30 minutes.

3D digital twin from your BIM. Import your IFC file (the standard BIM format), Sensia renders your building as an interactive 3D model. Drag your sensors onto the right floor, the right room. No other BMS offers this spatial granularity at this price point. Smooth drill-down Site → Building → Floor → Room.

ISA-18.2 compliant industrial alarms. The alarm system implements the full ANSI/ISA-18.2-2016 lifecycle: philosophy, identification, rationalisation, design, operation, audit. No more crying-wolf notifications: business rules, prioritisation, maintenance windows, multi-channel escalation (email, SMS, Discord, webhook), inhibit rules to break cascade storms.

Commissioning is assisted by Sensia, in three steps:

1. Account and box — Sensia opens your account if you don't have one yet, and registers the Sensia Link box of each building on it.
2. Box commissioning — connected to your BMS network, Sensia Link reads its points. Sensia checks that it reports measurements and acknowledges a test command before declaring it operational, then maps the relevant points to the quantities you track.
3. Setup in Assets — you create your hierarchy (sites, buildings, floors, rooms) and enter the building address: supervision opens. Import your IFC for the 3D model.

There is no standard duration: it depends on your BMS and the size of your portfolio, and is scoped with you before kick-off.

Predictive maintenance in Sensia rests on four complementary algorithms running continuously on the sensor streams:

• RUL (Remaining Useful Life) — estimated time to failure, based on observed degradation against historical signatures
• MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) — per equipment class, computed across the fleet
• Unsupervised anomaly detection — flags behaviours deviating from baseline without manual labelling
• Composite health score — 0 to 100 per equipment, aggregating the three metrics plus active alarms state

These algorithms are natively integrated — no separate ML pipeline to maintain, no data scientist to hire.

Sensia aligns with the main technical and regulatory standards in the sector:

• ISA-18.2 / ANSI/ISA-18.2-2016 — full alarm management lifecycle
• EEMUA 191 — alarm systems guide for chemical / oil & gas, applied to buildings
• W3C Web of Things (Thing Description) — capability-based modelling
• OGC SensorThings API — IoT data normalisation
• GDPR — by-design, France hosting, multi-tenant Row Level Security, audit log on every mutation
• AI Act (EU 2024/1689) — compliance panel classifying the 30 AI call-sites of the platform

Two stackable tiers, one platform — publicly priced, per square metre per year. No per-sensor pricing, and no mandatory quote just to learn the price.

• Sensia Compliance — the regulatory foundation: French Tertiary Decree trajectory, OPERAT filing, BACS Decree audit, energy audit (EN 16247) and compliance reports. Read-only, no real-time control. €2,500/yr flat below 2,500 m², then €1.00/m²/yr, and €0.75/m²/yr above 10,000 m². A €1,200 PoC lets you frame the portfolio before committing.
• Sensia Hypervision — the full offering: real-time supervision, multi-site hypervision, ISA-18.2 alarms, 3D BIM/IFC digital twin and predictive AI. Includes the whole of Compliance. €4,500/yr flat below 3,000 m², then €1.50/m²/yr, and €1.10/m²/yr above 25,000 m². A bespoke Enterprise tier (€2.50–4/m²) covers scopes that fall outside the grid — it is not a floor-area bracket but a dedicated scoping.

3D BIM: the digital twin is included in Sensia Hypervision, at no extra cost.

Are you a BMS integrator? A reseller grid at −30% is published on the integrators page.