BOULDER, Colo. — Technologies that make buildings smarter and more energy efficient continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Many of the new products and services center on the data that buildings produce in real time. Buildings have been producing volumes of data for many years, but today, according to a new white paper from Pike Research, many companies are starting to leverage the cloud as the basis for software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings.

Virtually every leading name in the building services industry has recently launched some form of building energy management system that hosts and manages building data in the cloud, the firm finds.

“Buildings are becoming smarter through the deployment of intelligent and energy efficient technologies that reduce energy consumption while making buildings easier to manage and operate,” said senior analyst Eric Bloom. “In addition, advances in software for building energy management systems (BEMS) as well as for building design (through building information modeling or BIM) are making it easier to design and maintain high performance buildings. Going forward, many of these advances will find their way to the cloud, making them more accessible over a broader range of applications and geographies.”