Smart Building Apps has created a technology solution that is turning apartment buildings and condos into well-informed communities. The Ottawa-based company offers a suite of building management apps that allows property managers, building owners, and staff to easily communicate, coordinate, and share information with residents. Smart Building Apps recently started an IoT project at CENGN to test the scalability of their platform.

Parking to Building Management

Smart Building Apps was founded 5 years ago, coming from a founding team with extensive experience in the parking industry. In fact, the team stems from the sister company Response Safety Security and Investigations, which has been in the parking industry for over 25 years. This industry experience was used to originally create a set of parking apps to be used by property managers and has since evolved into the creation of a feature-rich service for the management of all aspects of buildings.

Modernizing the Tenant and Building Communication Exchange

The communication channels between property managers and residents of apartment buildings is largely outdated. Typically, there is no structured process for submitting a work request or flagging an issue with the building. If a tenant needs to discuss an issue with their building manager they need to stop by their office, call, or send an email. Since property managers are pretty busy people it often leads to delays. Also, managing different requests through multiple channels can cause disorganization for property managers, causing inefficiency, longer waits, and certain tasks to fall through the cracks. Even more dated, any notices issued by property managers are typically done by printing off building memos, not only wasting paper but being impossible to track whether tenants have received a message. Smart Building Apps is working to bring communication within apartment buildings and condos to the modern era.

Smart Building Apps Solution

The solution is an all in one cloud-based property, building, and management software system that allows for seamless and organized messages, memos, and work requests for residents and property managers. The Smart Buildings Apps suite has 22 different applications including the six most popular apps below:

• Visitors parking
• Maintenance requests/work orders
• Payment portal
• Recurring tasks
• Amenity booking
• GPS Employee Action Tracker

Smart Building Apps prices their solution based off of the number of rooms in the buildings that are managed by the application along with how many apps the property manager wishes to include in their bundle.

Preparing for Large-Scale Commercial Deployment

The company has a few customers completing beta testing of the product right now, but not in production at the scale of a full commercial property. Smart Building Apps is building up their solution to target property managers that are responsible for several buildings. This goal means they need to scale to be used by hundreds of thousands of residents.

The purpose of the project is to ensure that the Smart Building Apps platform can process 500,000 requests through its applications each day. Within CENGN’s commercial-grade infrastructure and with the help of the customer solutions team, Smart Building Apps will be using the open source traffic generator, JMeter, to test their apps in different scenarios that would be used by a property manager or resident. The company will be given access to the CENGN testbed for 4 weeks to carry out testing, including running seven continuous 24-hour test periods followed by maintenance intervals allowing for product development.

This CENGN project will be an excellent opportunity for Smart Building Apps to discover the performance of their technology at scale and uncover any potential bugs. Any bug discovered during the project will be one less issue that will arise in a customer deployment. By the end of the project, Smart Building Apps will be one step closer to the deployment of their apps with commercial properties. Stay tuned for further details on the project!

Smart Building Apps is a growing Canadian business that is using the services at CENGN through the Next Generation Network Program (NGNP). The NGNP is a Government of Ontario program offered through a partnership between CENGN and the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) that is providing small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across Ontario access to the CENGN Testbed. CENGN’s digital infrastructure is connecting SMEs like Smart Building Apps to state-of-the-art equipment and network services, which will allow these companies to test and validate their solutions. Are you interested in completing a CENGN project? Learn more by clicking here.

Visit the Smart Building Apps website.

About the Author

CENGN, Canada’s Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, drives technology innovation and industry growth through our testbed, technical expertise, talent development, and partner ecosystem. Through our projects, CENGN enables small and medium Canadian Enterprises to test and validate promising technologies, removing barriers to product commercialization and accelerating market growth.

More by CENGN