The biggest fear before integrating a building is time: "this is going to take months". It doesn't have to. The Edge gateway model is, on average, one day per building — and it's worth understanding why, because the "why" is what separates an honest integration from a promise that falls through.
The gateway is industrial hardware, with 5G fallback for when the site's network won't cooperate, built to be installed and discovered the same day. What it does that day: auto-discovery of the devices, mapping to the client's tagging convention, and read/write over the protocols already there — BACnet, Modbus, MQTT, OPC UA. No per-point licence. No ripping out controls that work. No extra middleware living in the middle.
The underlying reason is the one we always repeat: we don't replace the building's nervous system, we give it a brain. And giving a brain to a system that already exists is a matter of hours, not months — as long as discovery holds up against the reality of the network.
The honest caveat: "one day" is the average for a normal building. A multi-building campus, with badly documented networks and hostile VLANs, takes longer — and we tell you up front, with the real estimate, instead of promising a day and showing up for a week. Honesty about timelines is part of the product.
The point that stays with you: the question isn't "how long do I have to shut the building down for this?". It's "why haven't you made what's already there talk yet?".