XY Sense Brings Occupancy Intelligence On-Premise with PremLink

On-premise appliance sends XY Sense's 99% accurate, 2-second occupancy data as BACnet/IP and UDMI, so buildings can rapidly respond to people without cloud loop

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, September 9, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- XY Sense, the global occupancy intelligence platform trusted by enterprise real estate teams, today announced the launch of PremLink, an on-premise appliance that transforms real-time occupancy data directly into the protocols a building's own management system (BMS) already understands.

Enterprise occupancy intelligence has historically been evaluated on sensor coverage, accuracy, analytics depth and installation ease. As adoption matures, so have requirements. Return on investment is no longer defined by the quality of a dashboard, but by whether occupancy data can be acted on. Can the solution drive building automation systems directly, not simply report on what already happened.

This requirement exposes a structural gap in the market. Occupancy sensing platforms have largely been built cloud-first: designed for dashboards, analytics and API delivery. Building management systems run on a different foundation entirely; on-premise, protocol-based, built for deterministic, local control via standards such as BACnet. Buildings don't consume dashboards. They consume building protocols, and few advanced occupancy intelligence platforms are built to speak both languages natively. For enterprise and highly regulated organizations, that gap is more than an integration inconvenience: a cloud-only architecture means automation depends on external connectivity, and occupancy data must leave the building's own network to reach a system the BMS can act on.

This raises real security and resiliency questions for OT environments. Occupancy data travels from sensor to cloud and back before the BMS can act on it; putting a ceiling on how quickly building automation can respond and inserting an additional point of failure between the sensor and the building. Local control also becomes contingent on a remote service and the network path to it, a dependency enterprise IT and OT teams have spent years designing out. Battery-powered sensors compound both problems: their minutes-long polling intervals were never designed for real-time automation in the first place.

XY Sense PremLink closes this gap.

PremLink is an on-premise device which carries XY Sense's market-leading occupancy signals to your BMS in under a second:

- BACnet/IP output — PremLink hosts occupancy status, headcount and percent-occupied as standard BACnet objects on its own device. The BMS reads them or subscribes to change-of-value.

- UDMI output (MQTT) — publishes UDMI v1.5.2-compliant occupancy events to an on-premise MQTT broker, supporting both virtual space and physical sensor devices.

- On-site processing for real-time response — because translation happens locally, building systems act on occupancy the moment it changes, without waiting on a cloud round-trip. It's the same market-leading speed XY Sense's sensors are known for — 2-second updates — carried all the way through to the automation layer in under a second. A pace no battery-powered sensor platform is built to match.

- Resilient through outages — if cloud connectivity drops, PremLink keeps feeding the BMS, caching locally and auto-syncing on reconnect. Automation keeps running on live occupancy, not a fallback schedule.

- Cloud where cloud wins — XY Sense Cloud handles what only cloud can: analytics across hundreds of billions of anonymous data points a year, secure access to that data across the organization, sensor health monitoring and calibration at fleet scale, and continuous feature delivery to every sensor in the estate without a site visit.

- Enterprise and government-grade security — no inbound connections, dedicated OT network isolation, mTLS sensor-to-gateway encryption, and no local CLI or SSH access. Built to align with the highest standards for regulated environments.

“For years, our customers have had to choose between the power of the cloud and the resilience of on-premise. PremLink is the best of both worlds,” said Alex Birch, Co-Founder and CEO of XY Sense. “Cloud scale and analytics that keep getting smarter, alongside live on-premise occupancy data that a building can depend on. The building never waits on the internet, and the platform never stops improving."

"The hard part wasn't the protocols. BACnet and UDMI are not new," said Luke Murray, Co-Founder and CTO of XY Sense. "It was compressing our cloud-scale sensor processing pipeline onto a server in a comms room without losing the accuracy it was built to deliver. PremLink carries the same infrastructure discipline behind our ~99% sensor accuracy all the way through to an on-premise automation layer, in near real time."

PremLink is a fully managed appliance, provisioned and maintained by XY Sense, so customers get local, real-time responsiveness without taking on the operational burden of managing firmware, configuration or the device itself:

- Ventilate for the people in the room, not the people the building was designed for. Standards such as ASHRAE 62.1 and CIBSE size fresh air at roughly 6.5 to 7.5 litres per second per occupant, but most buildings ventilate to design occupancy because live headcount has never been available. CO2-based control only responds once concentration has already risen. A ~99% accurate, 2-second count per zone removes the estimate, with expected HVAC energy savings of 20 to 40%.

- A foundation for WELL, ESG and carbon reporting. XY Sense and PremLink helps teams generate auditable, occupancy-driven data increasingly required by sustainability frameworks.

- The only enterprise occupancy platform with dedicated on-premise hardware and native BACnet/IP and UDMI output. Alternative approaches typically require customers to stack additional middleware or integration subscriptions on top of their sensor platform to achieve the same outcome.

Availability and Launch:

Early-access deployments are already underway with enterprise customers, including active rollouts at global financial services firms.

The PremLink appliance is purchased per building with an annual managed service covering infrastructure, remote monitoring, firmware management, technical support, and partner liaison. XY Sense provisions and maintains the device for the full deployment term.

To learn more:
- Visit xysense.com/premlink
- Request a briefing on real-time occupancy-driven building automation
- Meet the XY Sense team at PropTech Connect London, 9–11 September

About XY Sense:
XY Sense is the occupancy intelligence platform helping enterprise real estate teams make smarter, faster workplace decisions. Learn more here.

Rebecca Wood
XY Sense
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