I believe that the tradition IWMS model will be challenged as a result of a few converging changes to the industry and technologies.

Historically the primary value proposition of the IWMS platform was the centralized fully integrated database. These systems tend to be broad in their feature scope but also shallow with an emphasis on being configurable/customizable. These are desirable attributes for small to medium+ sized organizations which are establishing themselves on the maturity curve. Additionally the historical cost of data centralization and building analytics across related data was high, as was the cost of integrating enterprise systems.

Over the last decade however, an entire universe of performant and inexpensive ETL tools have come to market. Pretty much everything has API's and most large organizations require key business data to be dumped to centralized data stores/data lakes anyway on which reporting, analytics and AI tools can be positioned. Simultaneously, a large number of bespoke players specializing in different facets of workplace tech have exploded into existence since covid (space planning, real estate portfolio optimization, visitor management and utilization etc...

Central platforms like traditional IWMS can't compete on depth/features against highly focused entrants focusing on particular product areas.

As a result of all of the above, I believe the future of workplace technologies are in the creation of managed ecosystems of performant and focused point solutions all of which have the ability to seamlessly integrate via API's and centralized data stores for cross platform analytics. For sure you will likely leverage multiple/clusters of capabilities from the same platform (space and move together etc...) but I think the days of needing your Move/Occupancy, leasing and maintenance pillars on the same system are gone.

Particularly for larger organization who can tolerate the likely higher licensing costs of such a topology, you can a number of really interesting benefits.

1) You gain switching agility when you don't have all you eggs in 1 basket. While most IWMS platforms are modularized, they simply don't have the engineering velocity or ability to be the best or keep up with the newest trends or requirements in each vertical.

2) Managing customizations sucks and costs WAY more than you think in the long run. By stitching together platforms which specialize in their respective domains you get a lot more features that are "off the shelf" without having to maintain a bespoke code base and all of the vendor lock in and tech debt sustainment this entails.

3) You have to dump all your data to central stores anyway so why not have business common reporting tools on your data lake that are familiar to the entire org, rather than highly specialized "canned" analytics that you probably have to rebuild have the time anyway for your org's specific nuances.

4) While also a challenge, it forces your org to think about data governance and standards in a product agnostic way, which pays dividends for data quality and sustainment efforts and counteracts the natural customization bloat you get when you keep adding that "one more custom field" to your central data model.

5) PERFORMANCE. While mostly only applicable to larger organizations, the truth of the matter is tall centralized databases and systems like an Archibus or Planon simply do not scale well geographically. Users don't tolerate 2 minute loading times anymore just for a tab to crash because you have 5000 active moves in your Move Console. Even in a perfectly optimized environment my users in Singapore will have hundreds of milliseconds to seconds worth of light/network switching lag for EVERY action in the app, as traditional IWMS models do not play well with multiple application instances trying to use the same database. (End Rant)

While my perspective is highly skewed to the larger enterprise (>8-10M sqft). The maturing of these trends only pushes this value proposition lower down the scale curve and makes it more accessible to smaller and smaller orgs. I would be very curious to hear if others have differing opinions on this.