Why digital transformation has a physical address

From showcase to salable 

A good example of this strategy is 150 Holborn in London, the European headquarters of Sidara, a collective of architects, engineers, designers and project management and digital consulting firms. 

The company aimed to bring its London-based businesses together under one roof, making the building not only a showcase of professional expertise but also a space to foster collaboration and synergy across its core brands. These include architecture firm Perkins&Will, project management company Currie & Brown, engineering consultant Introba and, for digital consulting and digital twins, Para. 

The building itself was designed to unite these businesses, enabling them to become greater than the sum of their parts and deliver more value to their customers. 

Most building projects still follow a familiar, and flawed, sequence: the landlord commissions the shell, someone else fits it out and IT gets bolted on at the end. Sidara has flipped this order. Network architects, sustainability specialists and real estate planners worked together from day one. The result is a single converged network linking landlord systems, tenant environments and a dense layer of sensors. Climate control, usage of space and energy consumption are managed in real time, and landlord and tenant systems talk to each other rather than operating as sealed islands. 

The pay-off isn’t just technical neatness. Early feedback indicates higher comfort scores, fewer service calls and sustainability credentials that sway leasing decisions. AI helps here, tuning climate systems, predicting maintenance and analysing space usage, but only because the digital plumbing is already in place. 

Without robust foundations like internet of things integration, edge processing and standardised interfaces, AI would be little more than a party trick. The accreditation results that Sidara has received speak for themselves, receiving a “platinum” rating from the WiredScore, SmartScore global benchmark for smart building excellence and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), and “outstanding” from BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method). 

The economics and the ecosystem 

Sidara’s 150 Holborn project is a flagship, but the retrofit story might be even more persuasive. At Cisco’s Finsbury Circus site in London, 75% of floor space is now dedicated to small-group collaboration. Fixed desks have been cut from 95 to 50, and “elastic” zones shift between solo work, team sessions and events. The approach is archetype-based: define standard space mixes, technology baselines and design rules, then replicate them at speed without reinventing the wheel each time. 

The economics sharpen the argument. Cisco spends about $1bn per year running its real estate portfolio. Real-time occupancy data stops overprovisioning and energy systems respond to actual demand, reducing costs and carbon emissions. CCS Insight's Survey: Senior Leadership IT Investment, 2025 shows that more than half of decision-makers now rank energy efficiency and sustainability as top workplace investment priorities. This is precisely what that intelligent-ready buildings are designed to address. 

It’s also about how projects are delivered. 150 Holborn relied on a consortium — Sidara, Cisco, Schneider Electric, Ideal and Para — blending their expertise into a single offer. Working alone, each partner might win 40% to 50% of bids; together, they estimate win rates closer to 80%. Security is designed in, not patched on later, with identity-based access, network segmentation and continuous monitoring forming the baseline. 

The model travels well. For example, Cisco’s Paris office leans toward denser meeting rooms and strong acoustic treatments, the New York office emphasises executive briefings and client-facing spaces, and London's Finsbury Circus office opts for agile collaboration zones. Regulations and cultures differ, but the integration patterns and data model remain consistent. 

A more grounded route to better workplaces 

The ambition is simple: make intelligent-ready buildings as typical as high-speed internet. That means having a playbook of proven designs and integration patterns that landlords, developers and occupiers can adapt rather than build from scratch. 

For all the hype about the AI-first future, I believe intelligent-ready buildings are a grounded way to deliver results today. They also help create a platform of digital infrastructure that agentic AI can learn to orchestrate and optimise. Intelligent-ready buildings bring the physical and digital together from the outset, creating workplaces that work harder for people, budgets and the environment. 

Digital transformation isn’t just happening in the cloud. It’s happening in the walls around us. We explore these case studies, economics and design principles in-depth in CCS Insight’s upcoming Insight Series report. 

Bola Rotibi is chief of enterprise research at CCS Insight