22 Bishopsgate builds its smart building foundations with Genetec

Genetec Inc. (“Genetec”), a leading technology provider of unified security, public safety, operations, and business intelligence solutions, today announced that 22 Bishopsgate is centralising the control of IoT and physical security with Genetec™ Security Center. The software is helping to maximise the return on the prestigious facility's smart building investments, adding valued for visitors and tenants.

Sitting in the heart of the City of London's financial district, 22 Bishopsgate is a multi-tenanted commercial development that stands 278m tall and comprises 1,275 million square feet of floor space across its 62 storeys. Completed in 2020, it offers a secure workplace for up to 12,000 employees while also maintaining public access to amenities including a viewing gallery, restaurant and gymnasium.

"The beauty of what 22 Bishopsgate has created is that the more the building is used, the smarter it becomes. We're proud to be providing them with the tools through which their smart building vision has been realised," says Nick Smith, Account Executive Team Leader, UK & Ireland, Genetec Inc.

From the start, the vision was for 22 Bishopsgate was to be a people-centred smart building that would continually evolve to meet the changing needs of its occupants. Technology would be intelligently deployed in pursuit of new standards for sustainability, connectivity and workplace wellbeing. As a unified security platform, Security Center could meet their specific needs such as streamlining and consolidating all aspects of security and operations., The open architecture also allows it to pull in data from a range of devices and present this to its operators through one intuitive interface.  

"The danger of relying on lots of different systems is that many alarms are generated without necessarily being presented to the right people at the right time," explains Glenn Cowell, Smart Systems Manager, 22 Bishopsgate. "The beauty of the Security Center platform is its in-built customisation and flexibility. We own it and know we can shape it to our precise needs."

One of the first priorities for 22 Bishopsgate was to analyze daily building occupancy and usage, giving management and tenants a better understanding of how the facilities were being used. Working with its chosen integrator Total IT, the 22 Bishopsgate team started by deploying Synergis™ access control. This was quickly unified with video surveillance and analytics through Security Center. It then began implementing a series of IoT protocols - such as Bacnet, MQTT and SNMP - in order to begin ingesting data from other building systems and devices that could be visualised within Security Center.

These integrations have brought the engineering and operations functions together at both a technical and management layer, ensuring any possible incident can quickly be identified, logged, and responded to appropriately. They can also more easily identify meaningful patterns and trends on which to base future investment decisions.

To read the full customer story, visit: www.genetec.com/customer-stories/22-bishopsgate.