Planon Receives 2010 North America Award for Product Leadership From Frost & Sullivan
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 1 -- Based on its recent analysis of the real estate and facility management software market, Frost & Sullivan recognizes Planon, Inc. with the 2010 North America Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Leadership. Planon's Integrated Workplace Management Solution (IWMS) offers building owners, managers, and users a steady stream of information on real estate and facility management. Supported by sophisticated Web-based systems, Planon's solution helps organizations more effectively manage energy consumption, improve space utilization, and meet corporate social responsibility (CSR) objectives. Planon announced the latest version (2010.A) of its software last week.
Building owners and managers find it challenging to optimize the use of energy and space, while simultaneously lowering the lifetime utility costs for individual owners and tenants. Environmental sustainability also often takes a hit when organizations do not have the capability to address the issues of energy optimization and building operational efficiencies. Facility management software assumes great importance in such a scenario, especially because facility and asset managers are increasingly auditing and assessing their physical infrastructure to be a part of the greening process.
Planon has stepped in to fulfill these unmet market needs with its IWMS, a holistic real estate and facility management software that aligns building systems with the workplace environment using an Internet protocol (IP)-platform designed to streamline real-time operational activities. Apart from optimizing space utilization, it offers relative ease of expandability, adaptability, and significant energy cost reductions.
"By combining the core functionalities of capital asset management, space management, and work management into a single, Web-based software platform, the IWMS provides considerable value enhancement to organizations," says Frost & Sullivan Building Technologies Research Director Jorge Moreno. "The common user interface enables end users to monitor inefficient space utilization and allows for timely resource modifications associated with significant monetary gains."
The software bridges the gap between the maintenance and capital planning aspects of a property, and provides a wide framework for service delivery.
While most products in the market tend to emphasize maintenance management, capital planning, or energy management individually, Planon combines all capabilities under a single domain, while maximizing management and performance tracking of individual components at a micro level. The granularity of the breakdown of performance data spans the entire property portfolio, right down to a single building, floor, room or asset.
From a technology standpoint, the company emphasizes on forward and backward compatibility using new systems that can connect to an existing setup to assure flexibility to end users that opt for facility expansion.
"Planon represents a breakaway from most products and technologies in the industry that tend to impose varying degrees of proprietary restrictions that make it difficult to coordinate with a larger building network," notes Moreno. "Planon ensures upgradeability and compatibility with other new or older systems including security, building automation, property management, human resources, and capital planning."
IWMS' main objective is to help better manage large real estate and reduce cost of ownership by optimizing energy usage, cost of deferred maintenance, operating cost, space utilization, and asset management. The potential for cost savings with IWMS is especially attractive, considering that efficiently managing space utilization can save $1.5 per square foot per year, on average. From an environmental standpoint, the IWMS has the potential to reduce facilities' energy consumption by 30 percent, water by 40 percent, carbon emissions by 35 percent, and waste stream by 60 percent.
Each year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated excellence in new product development and launch within its industry. The recipient company has shown innovation by introducing a broad line of products and technologies.
Frost & Sullivan's Best Practices Awards recognize companies in a variety of regional and global markets for demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as leadership, technological innovation, customer service, and strategic product development. Industry analysts compare market participants and measure performance through in-depth interviews, analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to identify best practices in the industry.
About Planon
Planon is a global software provider of Integrated Workplace Management Solutions (IWMS), enabling corporate customers to cut costs and add value by centralizing and automating all their enterprise real estate and facilities management operations. The Planon series of solutions include Facility and Space Management, Operations and Maintenance Management, Project Management and Real Estate Portfolio Management. In business for more than 25 years, Planon has more than 1,300 clients in 16 countries. The Company's U.S. Headquarters is located in Braintree, Massachusetts. http://www.planonsoftware.com
About Frost & Sullivan
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