While attending the Cx Energy 2026 conference in Chicago, ACE IoT Solutions’ Andrew Rodgers and Bill Maguire took a drive to Aurora, IL to visit something we had wanted to see firsthand: the Nicor Gas Show Home, part of Habitat Green Freedom, a Nicor Gas Smart Neighborhood.
Data infrastructure is invisible when it works well. At a well-functioning site, the data layer stays out of sight, and a Cx team can focus on the building’s equipment and performance. Cx team members want to know whether the AHU is short-cycling, how the chiller plant is sequencing, and what to make of a flagged trend that could be either a real fault or just sensor drift. Cx team members are rightly less concerned about how the data they need is made available. They notice when the data they require are not where it needs to be. Getting that data where it needs to be is the work ACE IoT does for our partners.
Our partnership with BES Plus Tech provides a clear example of what becomes possible once a data layer–even an invisible one!–is reliable.
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Every engineering discipline has a theory of reliability. For civil engineers, it lives in load calculations and redundancy specs. Aviation earned its safety record through obsessive incident review. In the software industry, reliability has become the practice of assuming things will eventually break: what happens when you stop treating failure as an anomaly, and start preparing for it as a certainty? The answer to this question has become known as Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE.
SRE originated at Google in 2003 when Ben Treynor Sloss founded the first site reliability engineering team. The discipline produced the Google SRE Handbook, which sought to answer one question above all others: how do you keep massive, complex technology infrastructure running reliably when the people operating it are human?