Today, we're excited to announce the launch of XY Sense PremLink — our on-premise occupancy protocol gateway, purpose-built to meet the demands of modern, automation-driven buildings.
As enterprise real estate and IT & OT teams face increasing pressure to act on occupancy in real time, secure their building networks, and reduce dependency on cloud connectivity, many existing solutions fall short — relying on cloud round-trips, battery-powered sensors with minutes-long polling intervals, or added middleware just to speak the building’s own protocols.
PremLink changes that.
Built to compress XY Sense’s cloud-scale sensor processing pipeline onto a single on-premise appliance, PremLink delivers a powerful combination of native BACnet/IP and UDMI output, sub-second local response, and enterprise-grade security — enabling organizations to drive building automation directly from live occupancy, without the building ever waiting on the internet.
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, 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.
– Alex Birch, Co-Founder & CEO, XY Sense
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.
The hard part wasn’t the protocols. BACnet and UDMI are not new, 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.
– Luke Murray, Co-Founder and CTO, XY Sense
Purpose-Built for Automation, Not Just Analytics
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
- The XY Sense team will be at PropTech Connect London, 9–11 September to discuss PremLink with BMS technology partners, MSIs and smart building specifiers. Meet with the team at our booth.
