Case Study: Johnson Controls achieves scalable energy savings and predictive chiller maintenance with Microsoft Azure

Connecting Buildings to the Cloud for a Greener Planet

Johnson Controls, a longtime leader in building automation, faced a growing challenge as buildings produced massive volumes of sensor and equipment data that overwhelmed facility managers. The company needed a scalable way to aggregate disparate inputs, improve energy efficiency (especially for chillers, which drive about half of building energy use), and deliver actionable, real‑time intelligence to prevent costly failures and maintain occupant comfort.

Johnson Controls built a cloud‑based connected platform on Microsoft Azure (using IoT, analytics, storage, VMs, SQL Database and Power BI) to ingest and analyze roughly 14 million records a day and store terabytes of operational history. The solution connects thousands of chillers, rooftops and building subsystems, enabling real‑time monitoring and predictive maintenance that has averted failures, accelerated recovery, reduced unplanned downtime (avoiding losses cited as high as $300,000/hour in manufacturing), and delivered significant energy and cost savings for customers.

Johnson Controls

Jim Schwartz

Director, Strategic Marketing, Global Controls