Introducing Normal Software

I’m excited to announce the public launch of Normal Framework, a developer-focused toolkit that enables software teams to quickly get to market with their products for the building automation and real estate industries. Normal makes it easy to integrate building automation systems into portfolio-scale apps, or build an independent data layer that really scales; without needing to be come an expert in all of the arcane technologies that run buildings.

We’ve been connecting buildings to SaaS applications for a long time, first at Berkeley,¹ and later at Comfy/Siemens²; and we’ve captured a lot of the experience about what it takes to do integrations that work over a long time in the product. Things like easy-to-use discovery tools, health monitoring, data modeling, and open APIs are all provided by Normal, letting you focus on creating your unique product.

We’ve also learned a lot about the complex buildings ecosystem over the years and incorporated that into how Normal is delivered — it’s not a SaaS solution that can be hard to reconcile with increasingly complex security requirements; instead, we run on one of our many partner’s edge PaaS offerings (or on most Linux devices). Your data is entirely local, and you decide who gets it and on what terms. There’s also simple, per-building licensing that doesn’t expire and is easily folded into a project budget.

Software for building automation is in the midst of an ongoing transition from custom and proprietary hardware and software, to more open and standardized technology. We’ve built Normal with this transition in mind; bringing the best techniques from modern software engineering to tools teams will love using and building on.

Our customers are already using Normal in hundreds of buildings to power some of the most cutting-edge energy management, optimization, and controls applications on the market. They are the reason we exist, and we are grateful for thier trust. If you need data from buildings, or are building advanced controls we’d love to chat!

¹ We might have been the originators of the “building operating system” idea.

² Comfy, in its original incarnation, let users adjust their temperature using an app. Behind the scenes, it communicates over BACnet.