What size space does our organisation actually need to function? And how can we run it more economically, given the rapid rise in energy costs the country has experienced in the past 12 months?
These are the questions exercising the minds of Australian business leaders and operations managers around the country. As the Covid crisis, and the shutdowns and lockdowns that accompanied it, recede further into memory, establishing and bedding down ‘the new normal’ is now a priority, both locally and globally.
Making decisions about commercial real estate is a key component of that reset process. Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing an increasing thirst for accurate, detailed data on which to base those decisions.
Hence the emergence of what has been dubbed ‘occupancy analytics’. The term refers to the collection and crunching of data about employees’ onsite presence, from wireless systems. Typically, that data is blended with information about the premises and its outgoings. The result? Ideally, it’s a granular view of the value a business is deriving from the money it spends on its bricks and mortar presence.
An extraordinary nine in 10 local enterprises now gather data on their floor space utilisation and 65 per cent have set themselves the goal of improving their ‘space data accuracy’, according to CBRE Australia research.
Commercial property operator Knight Frank has clocked the trend too: its 2022 Outlook Report noted that 51 per cent of businesses had increased their use of data to make real estate and workforce decisions. The firm predicts reliance on occupancy analytics will become ubiquitous in the office environment in the years to come.
‘The reality is that only smart data collection can provide the tools to fully reconcile the actual days used, busy times, and types of activities taking place in different locations,’ the Report states.
‘In due course, such technologies could act as the data backbone behind workplace management decisions and, if used correctly, would boost employee engagement, providing a frictionless experience for the end users, while simultaneously allowing companies to gain valuable business intelligence, employee satisfaction, and space utilisation insights.’
Whether it’s from network telemetry, such as CPU and memory usage, traffic patterns, statistics on client connectivity and port and interface usage, or location data, such as the exact whereabouts of devices and their dwell times, the average enterprise network represents a rich seam of data, about how the physical space that it services is utilised across the working week.
That data can play a useful role in informing sustainability activities and energy efficiency initiatives – particularly when married with data from network connected devices, such as IoT sensors, that measure things like temperature, humidity, motion and pressure.
Being able to understand who’s using office space, when, and for what purpose can lead to significant savings in heating, cooling and lighting bills.
With costs rising and the threat of recession ever present, those are bankable benefits many Australian businesses are keen to realise, and soon.
But assembling relevant occupancy and usage data, and extracting actionable business insights from it, is impossible, in the absence of the right tools – a cloud based digital platform that enables you to derive maximum value from the network infrastructure that underpins your enterprise.
At Extreme Networks, that’s been our passion and purpose for more than two decades now. Our business, and our stellar reputation in the enterprise market, have been built on the back of our ability to help businesses make optimal use of their network data.
If unlocking the full potential of its network data is a priority for your business, we’d love to talk.
