Verdigris + Siemens | Validated Layer for Critical Power Paths

TL;DR. You run a Siemens shop. Building X is your data-center building-management platform, Desigo CC is your BMS and SCADA layer, and Sivacon panels expose integrated metering at the switchboard. Verdigris does not replace any of that. Verdigris EV2 sensors install on the critical power circuits, capture continuous 8 kHz waveform data (8,000 samples per second per circuit), ingest Siemens telemetry alongside, and become the system of record as the substrate for electrical health. Intelligence flows back to operators through MQTT, REST API, Modbus, and BACnet emulation. Your Desigo dashboards keep doing what they do.

Key takeaways

Building X is a data-center building-management platform with a building-automation lens. Verdigris is purpose-built for critical power paths with a critical-power lens.
Verdigris becomes the system of record as the substrate for electrical health. Sivacon, Desigo, and Building X remain authoritative for the workflows they were designed for.
Field evidence at a T-Mobile site: across an 800+ rectifier fleet, Verdigris detected degradation on about 4% of units (about 32 rectifiers of 800+). The advance warning fired 21 days before any standard BMS alarm.

What Siemens does well

Siemens is one of the most established names in building automation, and the Siemens DC stack reflects that heritage. Building X is the cloud platform that brings HVAC, lighting, access control, fire safety, and general electrical metering into a single operator surface. Desigo CC is a credible BMS and SCADA layer for campus and enterprise sites, with a tag, graphics, and alarm model that operators have invested in heavily. Sivacon low-voltage power distribution panels ship with integrated monitoring at the switchboard, so operators get panel-level metering out of the box. SiePortal, the Building X APIs, and Siemens Xcelerator give integrators a structured surface for extending the platform. If you have invested in Desigo and Sivacon, that investment keeps working.

"We're looking at Building X" is a reasonable place to start for any data center modernization. "Sivacon panels have monitoring built in" is true and useful. Neither answers the critical-power validation question on its own. That is where Verdigris comes in.

Why not reconfigure Sivacon + Desigo CC for higher-frequency capture?

The Sivacon switchboard ships with Sentron 7KM PAC integrated metering. The mid-tier panel options are typically PAC3200 or PAC4200, with PAC5200 in higher-spec switchboards. Those meters publish measurements over Modbus RTU on a CM-PAC bus into Desigo CC, with a Modbus TCP option for ethernet uplink. Desigo CC then aggregates Sentron data alongside BACnet, KNX, and M-Bus field traffic into the operator surface. Default Modbus query throughput tops out around 10 to 12 reads per second across the entire panel bus, and per-point BMS cadence lands in the multi-second range. That is the right regime for building-wide HVAC, lighting, access, life-safety, and panel-level energy reporting. It is the wrong regime for sub-cycle electrical waveform retention.

Building X (Siemens' newer AWS-hosted cloud platform) builds on top of Desigo CC for portfolio-level monitoring. It does not change the underlying BMS field-protocol polling architecture below it. Whether the Desigo CC instance is on-premises or surfaced through Building X Operations Manager, the field path from the 7KM PAC meter through Modbus RTU to the analytics layer is the same. Reconfiguring PAC meter sampling does not change the seconds-cadence aggregation that lives between the switchboard and the Desigo CC tag store.

Pretrained ML for UPS rectifier degradation, capacitor ESR drift, and harmonic failure signatures also does not exist on Building X. Building X is building-first across HVAC, lighting, fire, access, and energy reporting. Verdigris is purpose-built for the critical-power path on its own 8 kHz acquisition layer.

"Desigo CC V6 fulfills the BACnet B-XAWS profile for cross-domain advanced workstation."

Siemens Smart Infrastructure, Desigo CC V6 release announcement

The quoted profile is exactly the surface Verdigris targets with BACnet emulation. Verdigris appears on the Desigo workstation as a native BACnet device, with no BMS configuration change required to surface validated operating limits, anomaly events, and electrical state to the operator.

Verdigris EV2 sensors install on the critical power circuits as an independent measurement floor at 8 kHz continuous (8,000 samples per second per circuit). Desigo CC keeps doing what it does well across the building systems it was designed for. Verdigris adds critical-power electrical intelligence that the BMS polling architecture wasn't built to deliver, then feeds validated state back to Desigo workflows via BACnet emulation (zero integration lift, since Verdigris appears as a native BACnet device on the Desigo workstation).

Top: Siemens Desigo CC scan-group polling — samples arrive in clusters with gaps between scan windows. Bottom: Verdigris continuous 8 kHz waveform on the critical-power path. Soft teal band marks the 21-day advance-warning window per the T-Mobile rectifier fleet result.

Siemens Desigo CC uses BMS-scan-group polling. Verdigris captures 40,000 samples in that window

Customer triggers we hear

"We're already looking at Building X." Building X is a credible portfolio-level surface for HVAC, lighting, access, fire, and general energy reporting. It runs on top of Desigo CC and the same BMS field protocols (BACnet, KNX, Modbus) underneath. It does not change what the underlying polling architecture can retain at the analytics layer. Verdigris EV2 sensors capture continuous 8 kHz waveform on Verdigris's own measurement floor, ingest Building X and Desigo telemetry alongside, and feed validated state back via BACnet emulation. Building X stays the canonical building surface. Verdigris adds the critical-power validated layer underneath it.

"Sivacon panels have monitoring built in." True, and that built-in monitoring is the Sentron 7KM PAC meter family (PAC3200, PAC4200, PAC5200) publishing over Modbus RTU into Desigo CC. Those meters give panel-level current, voltage, power, and energy at seconds-cadence. They do not retain the sub-cycle waveform signatures that surface UPS rectifier degradation, capacitor ESR drift, or harmonic failure modes. Different measurement floor, different question. Sentron telemetry ingests into Verdigris for context.

"Our Desigo CC handles building monitoring." It does, and it should keep doing so. Desigo CC is a credible BMS and SCADA layer for HVAC, lighting, life-safety, and general electrical metering across the campus. It is not designed for sub-cycle waveform retention on the critical power path. Verdigris adds that layer underneath, on its own sensors, and feeds validated operating limits back into Desigo via BACnet emulation. Your Desigo tag, graphics, and alarm model stays intact.

Where the architecture limits visibility

The Siemens DC stack inherits a building-automation architecture. That architecture is excellent for the breadth problem it solves. It is not designed for the depth that critical power requires.

The Sivacon panel meters and Desigo CC integration deliver panel-level metering that aggregates upstream into Building X. The cadence is right-sized for whole-building visibility across five to seven building systems (HVAC controllers, lighting circuits, door sensors, fire panels, and electrical meters), at building-automation cadence at the analytics surface. That same cadence is the wrong tool for a UPS rectifier capacitor degrading at the millisecond timescale, for sub-cycle harmonic distortion driven by AI training workloads, or for partial-discharge signatures that precede insulation failure.

Two structural limits follow from this. The first is the analytics-layer cadence ceiling. Even where Sivacon meters capture sub-second data at the switchboard, that data aggregates as it flows up into Desigo and Building X. By the time the analytics surface sees it, the sub-cycle features that matter for critical-power validation are gone. The second is vendor lock-in across a mixed estate. Most operators have non-Siemens gear in their critical power chain (third-party UPS, PDUs from another OEM, switchgear inherited from a previous build). The Siemens lens does not extend cleanly across the brand boundary.

Stranded capacity is the practical outcome. PDU and busway headroom remains unallocated because the underlying electrical health is not measured at the resolution the question requires.

How does Verdigris integrate with Siemens Building X?

Verdigris EV2 sensors clamp on the critical power circuits independent of brand: Sivacon panels, third-party PDUs, mixed-vendor UPS, switchgear inherited from any OEM. The sensors capture continuous 8 kHz waveform data (8,000 samples per second per circuit) across four zones. Greyspace covers the utility edge through main PDUs, switchgear, UPS, and transformers. Whitespace covers the row and rack level. The server and power-shelf layer extends instrumentation into the IT load itself. The controls zone is where Verdigris integrates with Siemens and other software systems.

That continuous 8 kHz capture lives on Verdigris's own sensors. It is not inferred from Siemens telemetry. Verdigris ingests Sivacon, Desigo, and Building X data alongside its own signals as supplementary context (environmental conditions, building-level alarms, service-ticket state) and becomes the system of record as the substrate for electrical health.

Intelligence flows back to operators through four outbound integration surfaces:

MQTT broker. Verdigris-hosted, real-time pub/sub for any system that speaks MQTT.
REST API. Programmatic access to electrical state, anomaly events, and validated operating limits.
Modbus. Production-validated, field-grade OT protocol for direct integration with controls.
BACnet via emulation mode. Verdigris sensors appear as native BACnet devices on the operator network. Your Desigo CC installation sees Verdigris as one more BACnet device. No BMS configuration change is required: zero integration lift for the operator who already has a Desigo workflow.

Practical outcome for the operator. Desigo dashboards keep doing what they do. Sivacon panel metering keeps doing what it does. Verdigris adds the validated layer underneath, at the 8 kHz resolution that critical power demands, and feeds its conclusions back into the operator surface you already use.

What 8 kHz waveform analysis catches that BMS scan-group polling cannot

The validated layer earns its place by catching three failure modes that building-automation architecture is not designed to see. Electrolytic capacitors in UPS rectifier stages degrade slowly, and the early indicator is a shift in the 5th and 7th harmonic ratios drawn from the AC mains. Current-distortion limits are governed by IEEE 519-2022. That signature lives entirely in sub-cycle electrical data. Aggregated metering cannot retain it.

"Limits for harmonic voltages on the public power supply system at the PCC, or point of common coupling."

IEEE 519-2022, Recommended Practice for Harmonic Control

AI training workloads pull current in patterns that change at sub-second timescales. Aggregated readings average out the transients that actually stress upstream UPS and PDU stages. Verdigris captures the transients directly, so operators see the real stress profile, not the smoothed one. Early-stage insulation failures present as partial-discharge signatures and high-frequency current asymmetries. Those phenomena fall under NFPA 70 Article 110.16 arc-flash hazard considerations. The Uptime Institute 2024 Outage Analysis confirms the pattern: power-related incidents remain the single largest category of significant data center outages, accounting for 54% of impactful outages in the 2024 dataset.

Verdigris samples electrical waveforms at 8 kHz, 8,000 samples per second per circuit, and retains that resolution into the analytics layer. That is the architectural difference, not a benchmark contest.

Customer proof

Across an 800+ rectifier fleet at T-Mobile, Verdigris detected electrical degradation on about 4% of units (about 32 rectifiers of 800+). The advance warning fired 21 days before any standard BMS alarm. The incumbent BMS missed the degradation entirely during that window. That gap is not a knock on the BMS. It is a statement about what a building-automation architecture is designed to see.

"Verdigris Signals gives us visibility into degradation patterns that don't surface in standard monitoring. That visibility lets us maintain reliability while optimizing capital allocation."

Senior Director, Infrastructure and Engineering, T-Mobile

See the full T-Mobile case study for the 8 kHz waveform detection methodology and full fleet results across 800+ rectifier units.

How it deploys in a Siemens shop

An enterprise data center inside a Siemens-managed campus runs Building X for HVAC, lighting, security, and general electrical visibility, with Desigo CC as the BMS and SCADA layer and Sivacon panels at the switchboard. Verdigris EV2 sensors install on UPS input and output circuits and key downstream PDU feeds, capturing continuous 8 kHz waveform data at each circuit. Verdigris ingests Building X and Desigo telemetry for environmental and alarm context. Verdigris exposes its anomaly events, validated operating limits, and electrical state back to the operator via MQTT, REST API, Modbus, and BACnet emulation. Desigo sees Verdigris as a native BACnet device with no configuration change.

The operator workflow does not change. Building X stays the canonical surface for facility operations. Desigo stays the BMS. Sivacon stays the panel-level meter. Verdigris becomes the validated layer for critical power: the system of record for electrical health, and the answer to "is my electrical chain healthy enough for the next GPU expansion?"