Part 1 of a three-part series exploring the evolution of Energy Management development on Cumulocity—from foundational platform capabilities to Digital Twin Manager, AI-assisted development and vertical accelerators.
Every engineering discipline has a foundation.
Structural engineers don’t begin with skyscrapers; they begin with the principles that make them stand. Software architects don’t begin with artificial intelligence; they begin with the architecture that makes intelligent systems possible.
Energy Management is no different.
When people think about modern Energy Management solutions, they often picture sophisticated dashboards, predictive analytics, AI-driven optimisation and digital twins. Those capabilities undoubtedly create value, but they sit at the very top of a much larger engineering stack. Before any organisation can optimise energy consumption or identify inefficiencies, it must first solve a far more fundamental problem: how to connect assets, collect operational data, manage devices, and create an architecture that reliably supports the application over time.
Ironically, those foundational capabilities are also where engineering teams spend much of their time.
This article is the first in a four-part series examining how Energy Management solutions have evolved on Cumulocity. Rather than making broad claims about development speed, we’ll look at real engineering examples to understand how successive platform capabilities have progressively reduced the effort required to deliver production-ready solutions. We begin with one of the earliest Energy Management implementations built on the platform; not because it represents the latest technology, but because it establishes the baseline from which everything else has evolved.
Every Energy Management solution starts with the same architectural problem
Regardless of the industry, most Energy Management applications share a remarkably similar architecture.
Whether you’re monitoring compressed air systems in a manufacturing plant, tracking energy generation from distributed solar assets, or optimising utilities across a commercial estate, the engineering challenges are largely the same. Devices must connect securely. Telemetry needs to be collected continuously and stored reliably. Assets have to be organised into meaningful operational models. Dashboards present information to users, alarms notify operators when conditions change, and integrations connect operational data with wider business systems.
None of these capabilities are unique to a particular customer. They are the engineering foundation that every serious Energy Management solution requires before any domain-specific functionality can be delivered.
This distinction is important because it separates two very different kinds of engineering effort. One is foundational infrastructure; the capabilities every project needs simply to exist. The other is business differentiation; the functionality that reflects a company’s expertise and delivers value to its customers.
Understanding where that boundary lies is central to understanding Cumulocity’s Buy & Build philosophy.
Returning to an early Energy Management implementation
To establish that baseline, it’s worth revisiting one of the earliest production Energy Management solutions built on Cumulocity.
SMC, a global manufacturer of pneumatic automation equipment, recognised that many of its customers were facing a growing challenge. Compressed air is one of the most expensive utilities in industrial operations, and relatively small inefficiencies (such as air leaks or poorly performing equipment) can significantly increase energy consumption, operating costs and carbon emissions.
Customers didn’t simply need access to sensor readings. They needed visibility into how their pneumatic systems were performing, where energy was being wasted and how operational efficiency could be improved. At the same time, SMC saw an opportunity to complement its hardware portfolio with digital services that provided ongoing customer value beyond the initial equipment sale. The result was Smart Field Analytics, an Energy Management solution designed to help customers monitor compressed air systems and identify opportunities for improvement.
Although the application focused specifically on pneumatic systems, the underlying engineering challenge was universal. The same architectural foundation could support countless other Energy Management use cases because the difficult part wasn’t understanding compressed air; it was building the platform capable of supporting the application.
Reconstructing the architecture
Looking back at the SMC implementation, the architecture itself is surprisingly familiar.
At the lowest level, industrial devices needed to connect securely and transmit operational measurements. Those measurements had to be ingested, stored and organised into a structure that operators could understand. Dashboards transformed raw telemetry into meaningful visualisations, while streaming analytics enabled real-time monitoring and defined thresholds that triggered alarms when abnormal operating conditions required attention. Finally, the resulting information needed to integrate with cloud services and wider business processes.
Viewed individually, none of these capabilities are particularly remarkable. Collectively, however, they represent months of engineering effort if built independently.
This is where many organisations underestimate the true cost of developing industrial software. Building a proof of concept is rarely the difficult part. Building an operational platform that reliably handles connectivity, telemetry, security, monitoring and lifecycle management is where projects often consume significant engineering time before any business-specific functionality has even been developed.
The SMC implementation illustrates this distinction particularly well.
Rather than building an IoT platform from first principles, the solution was constructed on top of Cumulocity’s existing platform capabilities. With no coding required, the solution was set up and running in under 20 minutes. Secure device connectivity, telemetry collection, device management, dashboards, alarming and integration services were already available as reusable platform components. Instead of recreating this common infrastructure, SMC’s engineers were able to focus on solving the Energy Management problem itself.
Separating platform engineering from business engineering
This separation between platform engineering and application engineering is perhaps the most important lesson from the SMC implementation.
Customers weren’t investing in another device management platform.
They were investing in a solution that helped reduce energy waste, improve operational efficiency and better understand the performance of their pneumatic systems.
Those outcomes depended on SMC’s expertise.
The company’s engineering effort was directed towards understanding operational behaviour, identifying energy inefficiencies and presenting information in ways that customers could immediately act upon. Those capabilities reflected decades of domain knowledge and represented genuine competitive differentiation.
Everything beneath that—the connectivity layer, telemetry management, dashboards, alarms and platform services—was infrastructure.
That observation feels almost obvious when viewed in hindsight, yet it continues to influence how industrial software is developed today. Every hour spent recreating common infrastructure is an hour not spent delivering functionality that customers actually value.
The Buy & Build Principle
The SMC implementation illustrates a simple principle: engineering effort is most valuable when focused on what differentiates the business.
This is the idea behind Cumulocity’s Buy & Build approach. Reuse the foundational capabilities that every Energy Management solution needs, and focus development effort on the domain expertise and functionality that creates value for customers.
The tools available to engineers have evolved considerably since the SMC implementation, but that principle remains the same: build what differentiates your business, and reuse what doesn’t.
Why the baseline still matters
Looking back, it’s tempting to compare the SMC solution with today’s platform capabilities and focus on everything that has changed.
There were no Digital Twins simplifying asset modelling. No AI-assisted development accelerating application creation. No vertical accelerators packaging proven engineering patterns for specific Energy Management scenarios.
Yet that misses the point.
The value of the SMC implementation lies precisely in what it demonstrates: even with only the foundational platform capabilities available at the time, it was possible to deliver a production-ready Energy Management solution without building an IoT platform from scratch.
Everything that has followed builds upon that same architectural foundation.
Digital Twin Manager doesn’t replace it; it reduces the effort required to model complex assets. AI-assisted development doesn’t replace it; it reduces the effort required to build applications on top of it. Vertical accelerators don’t replace it; they package years of engineering experience into reusable starting points for common Energy Management scenarios.
The architecture remains. The engineering effort required to build upon it continues to shrink.
Looking ahead
Every engineering evolution begins with a foundation.
The SMC implementation established that foundation for Energy Management solutions on Cumulocity. It demonstrated that engineering teams could stop treating connectivity, telemetry management and operational infrastructure as bespoke project work and instead concentrate on delivering the functionality that customers actually needed.
That remains the central idea behind Buy & Build today.
In the next article, we’ll revisit this same architectural challenge through the lens of Digital Twin Manager. We’ll explore how one of the most labour-intensive aspects of industrial software development—modelling complex energy assets—has evolved from a manual engineering task into a reusable modelling approach, bringing Energy Management development another step closer to Cumulocity’s Buy & Build (Faster) vision.