The joint solution allows utilities, building owners and enterprises, including factories, to achieve significant reductions in energy use and take advantage of tax incentives by better managing their energy consumption and enforcing their enterprise energy strategies. The solution also meets strict ISO 50001 requirements for continual improvements in energy management systems for industrial plants, commercial facilities or buildings.

Echelon's energy control networking platform supports open control standards such as LonWorks (ISO/IEC4908-1), Modbus or M-bus, to integrate and communicate with meters, load controllers, displays and other equipment in a building. The new system can also be retrofitted into a building with Echelon's SmartServer, built on Echelon's energy control networking platform. It provides remote command and control capabilities and deliver energy data to ITC's portal software to process and display in real-time. Nemetschek Allplan's CAFM system overlays the Echelon/ITC data with area and occupancy information for advanced analytics capabilities to benchmark energy consumption against other buildings or facilities and provide end-users with an ability to manage and analyze their energy use and leverage grid conditions to lower costs, such as a demand response program.

"With intelligent energy management, the potential for increasing profitability is significant. This is an area of increasing focus for customers of our facility management solutions. By merging the core expertise of three specialist providers, we can launch an entirely new and highly innovative approach for energy management systems on an enterprise level," said Peter Mehlstäubler, CEO of Nemetschek Allplan.

The core aim of ISO 50001 is the continual improvement of an organization's energy performance, such as industrial plants, commercial facilities or buildings. The standard specifies requirements for establishing, implementing, maintaining and improving an energy management system, the purpose of which is to enable an organization to follow a systematic approach for improving its energy performance, increasing energy efficiency and optimizing energy use. ISO 50001 is anticipated to influence up 60 percent of the energy use worldwide and substantially lower the emission of greenhouse gas.

With the introduction of ISO 50001, energy management systems are providing opportunities to achieve a precondition to gain tax relief in Germany in the context of energy use and consumption. It is anticipated that the use of an energy management systems in Germany will be legally binding to achieve any tax advantages in 2013.