Session Profile
Legacy BMS Modernization: Incremental Paths to Digital Maturity
Overview
| Track: | Smart Buildings / Facilities |
| Location: | 26B |
| Date: | 6/3/2026 |
| Time: | 1:45 pm - 2:30 pm |
Description
Most buildings continue to operate on legacy platforms that were never designed for modern analytics or adversarial security. This session presents owner led case studies on how to modernize these environments without the disruption of a full rip and replace project. Presenters will detail practical upgrade paths using gateways, protocol translation, and decoupled visualization strategies to create an API layer over aging hardware. Discussion will include the integration challenges and cybersecurity tradeoffs encountered during multi-year rollouts. Attendees will leave with a modernization playbook grounded in real building constraints rather than theoretical architectures.
Participants
Moderator:
Marc Petock, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Lynxspring since 2012, leads corporate strategy, product vision, and brand development, including JENEsys Edge®, Onyxx®, and E2E™. Previously VP of Global Marketing at Tridium, he helped position Niagara as the industry’s open platform for smart buildings, growing its adoption from 18K to 475K instances. A recognized industry leader, Marc is an advocate for open standards, semantic tagging, data modeling, and OT cybersecurity. He is a frequent speaker, published author, and recipient of multiple industry awards. Marc also advises Realcomm and co-founded Project Haystack, where he serves on the Board.
Speakers:
Ryan Droege heads Cushman & Wakefield’s digital buildings practice where he helps real estate and facilities leaders modernize building operations through connected systems, analytics, and measurable performance improvement. A built-environment veteran with more than 30 years of experience, Ryan bridges building automation, operational technology (OT), and enterprise priorities to turn building data into outcomes; reducing energy waste, improving reliability and comfort, and enabling scalable portfolio governance. His work often centers on creating practical roadmaps for connectivity, standardizing data for portfolio-level insights, and operationalizing tools such as fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) to accelerate issue resolution and continuous optimization.
Chris Ryan brings over 15 years of experience in Building Automation Systems (BAS), with deep expertise in the Niagara Framework and intelligent building technologies. His background spans sales engineering, systems integration, and solutions architecture, giving him a rare end-to-end perspective on how smart buildings are designed, deployed, and scaled. Today, he leads Corporate Real Estate Technology strategy at Walmart, driving innovation at the intersection of smart buildings, data, and enterprise scale.
Having spent most of his career within the Distech Controls organization with 15 years of experience in the industry, Ryan Sen most recently served as Director of Sales where he was in charge of the sales channel for the entire Canada. He has previously held a multitude of management roles within the organization. Ryan has also performed Business Development for the Distech Controls Energy Services division and briefly supported the Canadian Market in a Regional Sales Management role.
Nate joined Stream Realty Partners in 2009 as Operations Manager for the downtown Austin portfolio and is currently a Regional Director of Building Operations. Nate has twenty years of experience in commercial building maintenance and management in all types of building uses including office and industrial; included in this are semi-conductor production facilities, clean rooms, condo buildings, etc.