Traditional CTS/BMS puts walls between you and the systems you already own - and charges you to see through them. Open CTS/BMS removes the walls.
Direct integration with heating, ventilation, pumps, PV/Solar, lighting, and apartments - one open data layer, one alarm stream, your data out via API. No per-datapoint fees. No vendor lock. No forced retainers.
Every meter, every system, every space feeds up into the Open CTS/BMS layer - where you see, control, and act. Traditional CTS/BMS reads only HVAC. This one reads across all of it, and every Operations service takes its inputs from here.
Traditional CTS/BMS, at its best, connects heating and ventilation on one control logic. Everything else - pumps, PV/Solar, lighting, apartment consumption - runs in its own silo, on its own vendor's terms. Open CTS/BMS pulls all six onto the same layer, with the same rules for how data comes out. Whichever vendor built the systems, we integrate - hardware-agnostic by design.
Almost every building we walk into is in one of three states. Each has a specific pain, a specific version of the traditional-provider problem, and a specific NorthQ answer.
"The CTS/BMS works. But every extra alarm is a line item, every extra data point is a quote, and any change request takes weeks. We stopped asking for anything we didn't have to."
You have a CTS/BMS. You have a contract. It's priced to be tolerable - not useful. The provider makes money on what they charge extra for, so extras never get cheap.
"We had a contract once. It cost too much and did too little. The FM team took it over. The CTS/BMS still exists - nobody watches it, nobody trusts it, nothing gets caught."
Common state. The infrastructure is in the building. The engagement isn't. The alarms fire into a void. The data goes nowhere. Better than paying the traditional provider - worse than actually operating the building.
"There's a heating controller. There's a ventilation unit. There's a PV/Solar inverter. Each has its own software, its own alarms, its own quirks. Nobody has ever looked at them together."
More common than the industry admits. NorthQ connects direct to every system - heating, ventilation, PV/Solar, lighting, apartments - and builds the layer from the systems up. No middleware. No proprietary CTS/BMS to displace.
Traditional CTS/BMS providers built an industry on the premise that your building's data belongs to whoever installed the box that reads it. We disagree - and we wrote our commercial model to prove it.
No per-datapoint fees. No per-alarm fees. No "premium" tier that unlocks the readings you were going to pay for anyway. Every system connected to Open CTS/BMS is queryable from day one, in standard formats, by whichever tools you already use.
Portable, exportable, no proprietary containers. The service schedule names the data as the client's property - not the provider's. Every other vendor and every other tool in your stack can read it, alongside us.
No multi-year forced retainer. No penalty structure engineered around switching costs. The service schedule includes a named exit procedure - how the handover happens, what you keep, what closes down - written before you sign.
EPBD Article 13 (Directive EU 2024/1275) mandates a CTS/BMS for every non-residential building whose heating, cooling, or combined-ventilation system exceeds 290 kW effective rated output - a threshold active since 2025.
On 31 December 2029, the threshold drops to 70 kW, which brings the majority of mid-size commercial and mixed-use buildings inside the mandate.
The 2024 recast added a new capability requirement as of the transposition deadline that passed on 29 May 2026: the CTS/BMS must now support indoor climate monitoring - temperature, humidity, ventilation rate, air quality.
In Denmark, these requirements live in Bygningsreglementet. Non-compliance is a defect a buyer's technical due diligence will surface, a lender's green-financing check will flag, and an EPC assessor will note.
Open CTS/BMS meets these requirements from day one - without the per-datapoint pricing structure the traditional providers built around them.
Legacy providers price CTS/BMS around four levers - setup, per-datapoint and per-alarm subscriptions, multi-year retainers, and annual service contracts that promise "optimal energy performance" and rarely deliver it. Open CTS/BMS prices differently - and delivers on what it charges for.
At the Nordhavn case, a traditional CTS/BMS provider held exactly this contract - the one promising "energy-optimal operations." When we walked the building, we found €12,060/year in savings the contract had been paid to deliver, and hadn't. Overtaking these contracts is the easier half of the sale.
We'll come look. Free of charge for the first asset in your portfolio. Worst case: you find out what your data actually looks like - and what it would cost to actually own it.
Talk to us about your building