The German market for CAFM and IWMS software is currently undergoing a fascinating phase of transformation, which from the outside looks like a state-of-the-art digitalization miracle. The industry is consolidating at an acceptable pace, driven by private equity investors and (more or less) large player mergers. At the glossy presentations of industry events, the song of unlimited possibilities is sung, garnished with terms like artificial intelligence, predictive maintenance, and seamless integration (I find this term strange, by the way, but that's how it is with Anglicisms sometimes). As a customer in the German SME sector or public administration, you feel modern, future-proof, and in the best hands. The contracts for the new, chic subscription models are solemnly signed ("Great, we're in the cloud!"), and one believes oneself to be at the destination of digital dreams.
But what is often overlooked in this moment of euphoria is the fine print architectural concept of this new digital home. The dynamic market concentration in the DACH region paradoxically does not lead to more technological freedom, but often to an ever-tightening corset. Instead of an open, flexible loft, many companies are renting themselves into a beautifully designed, but hermetically sealed golden cage. We in the industry like to talk about the notorious lock-in effect as if it were an unpredictable natural event that hits us completely by surprise out of nowhere. Yet, we mostly build these walls around our data ourselves, underpinned by an almost touching degree of naivety in system selection. Stockholm sends its regards...
Certified in dependency
In Germany, we traditionally like to feel secure about software selection through certificates and standards. Software that is certified according to GEFMA 444 and calculates spaces obediently according to DIN 277 is considered a safe bet by default in purchasing circles. While these certificates (or self-declarations) guarantee that certain minimum professional standards are met, they say absolutely nothing about the architectural Openness of the system. In an ideal world, the data model of a software is transparent and fully accessible to the customer, so that they understand how their assets and processes are linked. In the reality of the German market, however, companies are choosing systems whose data architecture resembles a secret black box, one after another.
You are essentially handing over the blueprints for your core processes to the provider and receiving a closed system in return. The customer is degraded from a proud operator to a mere consumer of a colorful user interface, who no longer even knows which proprietary table their technical building equipment is actually stored in. If you don't know how your own data is structured, you can neither analyze it properly nor integrate it into overarching ESG reporting tools. You are renting space in your own data house and are not even allowed to see the floor plan, which is downright negligent in times of mandatory sustainability reporting. It's like trying to navigate a complex building blindfolded just because the architect hid the light switch.
The digital twin in solitary confinement
This spectacle becomes particularly amusing when we look at how Building Information Modeling (BIM) is handled. In the planning and construction phases, millions are sometimes invested to create detailed, semantically rich 3D models with countless IFC classes and attributes. One dreams of the perfect digital twin that accompanies the entire lifecycle of the property. Then comes the handover to operations, and this highly complex data masterpiece is unceremoniously rammed into the operator's closed CAFM system. What sounds like a seamless baton pass in theory is often a one-way street to the data grave in practice (I've already written something about this).
Once the BIM model has landed in the proprietary system, it is often stripped of its flexibility and cemented into a rigid database structure. The digital twin is essentially put into solitary confinement. If the customer later wants to Changes make on the model, transfer it to another system, or the geometry data enrich with new sensor values from an IoT network, he runs into thick, invisible walls. The data is physically there, but it is so tightly interwoven with the provider's proprietary logic that agile work on the model becomes simply impossible. The expensively paid twin withers away into a static "3D PDF with magical fairy dust" that looks nice but no longer delivers any operational added value.
Workflows as an elite art form
It becomes even more absurd when we look at the adaptation of workflows, a topic that has gained massive urgency due to the current shift to cloud and SaaS models. Modern facility management thrives on Agility and constant Adaptation to new circumstances, legal requirements, or new service providers. Logically, the operator of the software should be able to adapt an approval workflow for a maintenance measure themselves. But this is where the golden cage trap on the German market snaps shut particularly mercilessly.
In many established systems, the creation or adaptation of workflows is a highly complex art form exclusively reserved for the provider's developers. The attempt to add another field for CO2 data collection to a simple dropdown menu then quickly mutates into a bureaucratic marathon. The customer writes a ticket, which lands in the provider's backlog, is evaluated by a project manager, priced, and fed back as an expensive change request. What should actually be a matter of five clicks in a modern no-code backend becomes an IT project with a price tag that could also lease a company car.
The private equity paradox
In doing so, we rob ourselves of our own agency and, ironically, turn the CAFM system into the bottleneck of the entire organization. The innovation speed of the facility management department is no longer determined by its own employees but by the software manufacturer's release planning. And here the lock-in effect meets a brutal market dynamic: capacities at German manufacturers are chronically scarce. This is not only due to the general shortage of skilled workers but also to the strategic orientation of many software users, who are now strictly managed by key figures (or you have found a truly people-friendly provider, that does happen too).
The primary goal of many providers today is Increase in recurring SaaS revenue through new customer acquisition. Resource-intensive customization for the impatient existing customer inevitably slips down the priority list. After all, why should you give the customer a tool for self-help when you can instead put them in an endless queue and later charge them for expensive consulting hours? Facility managers plan redundancies for every unimportant circulation pump in the building, but when it comes to the critical control software for their portfolio, they accept a single point of failure in the form of a completely overloaded support employee.
Data hostage-taking according to DIN standard
"Our data belongs to us." This sentence is uttered with heroic conviction in almost every kick-off meeting, often accompanied by references to compliance guidelines. From a legal perspective, this may even be correct, but from a technical perspective, it is often a farce in the CAFM environment. The true character of a software is not revealed during the harmless import of initial master data via lovingly maintained Excel lists. It only becomes apparent during daily interaction with the transactional and process data that forms the actual operational memory of the entire property.
As a customer in the German market, just try to get the detailed history of tens of thousands of fault messages, including all status changes, service provider comments, and booked times, out of a proprietary system. Companies often only realize after years that a mass export of their process data is simply not provided for. The software might offer flat CSV exports of pure room lists, but the critical relational links remain trapped within the system. Without these connections and the historical timeline, the raw data is practically worthless for in-depth analysis or later migration.
The fairy tale of standardized exchange
Why doesn't the industry protest more loudly against these practices? Perhaps because for years we've been told the comforting fairy tale that there are, after all, saving exchange formats. Anyone who has been in the CAFM world for a while will inevitably remember initiatives like "CAFM-Connect." It sounded absolutely wonderful in the glossy brochures and promised seamless data exchange. From my very personal perspective, however, it was always thought too small and, above all, heavily marketing-driven. It was a well-intentioned attempt to cover a complex wound with a much too small bandage. With the last update in early 2019, oh dear.
Today, in the harsh reality of highly complex, relational process data, dynamic workflows, and global IWMS architectures, such historical formats play hardly any serious role anymore. In facility management, there is de facto no all-encompassing, established plug-and-play standard that simply saves us during a system change. Anyone who relies on a rudimentary exchange format to handle the export of their individual process history will experience an unpleasant surprise when changing systems. We allowed ourselves to be blinded by the illusion of standardized interfaces, while the providers in the background only cast the bars of their proprietary cages thicker.
The rude awakening in case of exit
Every software marriage eventually ends, be it due to technological obsolescence, dissatisfaction, or changed IT strategies. And precisely at this moment of exit, the true face of the contracts negotiated years earlier over coffee and snacks is revealed. Especially in public tenders according to EVB-IT or in standard contracts for medium-sized businesses, the focus is heavily on operation, while the exit is neglected. Entering a proprietary system without open APIs and a hard exit strategy is akin to renting a state-of-the-art office complex where the landlord retains sole access rights to the company archive: As long as you pay rent on time, they kindly hand over your own files through the window, but woe betide you if you terminate the contract.
Often, clear exit clauses are completely missing. There are no hard contractual regulations regarding the structured format, the timeframe, and, above all, the fixed costs for which the entire relational database content must be handed over. In this scenario, the previous provider understandably has absolutely no motivation to make the extraction comfortable. Suddenly, daily rates are charged for data extractions and so-called migration support that exceed any previous financial framework.
The client painfully realizes that they have become vulnerable because all their FM knowledge from recent years is being held hostage on the servers of the departing partner. The alternative is often a complete and tragic loss of process history data. You effectively start from scratch with the new system, only taking master data with you and losing valuable insights into lifecycles, failure rates, and service provider performance. This intellectual loss of value is the ultimate price for initial convenience.
A plea for digital independence
We urgently need to rethink our approach in the German-speaking CAFM and IWMS market. Purchasing software should not mean blindly handing over responsibility for our data architecture and process logic to external service providers. We need systems that empower us as operators, not ones that patronize us due to their architectural deficits. A true no-code concept for workflows, transparent data models, and open, bidirectional REST or GraphQL interfaces must be mandatory knockout criteria in every tender.
The exit from the system must be planned in detail and contractually fixed on the day cooperation begins. Those who understand their data structures and can independently adapt processes not only significantly reduce ongoing costs. Above all, they ensure the survival and agility of their company in an ever-changing real estate world. At the end of the day, we should reduce software back to its actual purpose: it is a pragmatic tool for our processes – and not a rigid framework dictated to us by the manufacturer.
