Case Study: Honeywell achieves connected smart‑home services and faster IoT innovation with Microsoft Azure

Opportunity heats up as Honeywell connects with homeowners

Honeywell, a 125‑year‑old household name with products in more than 150 million homes and 129,000 employees worldwide, set out to transform its thermostats and security systems into connected services. The company faced a scaling challenge: it had built a large, vertical device‑to‑cloud stack (millions of lines of code and over 100 man‑years) and needed a secure, standards‑based enterprise IoT platform to manage real‑time data and refocus engineering effort on customer‑facing innovation.

Honeywell built the Sentience platform on Microsoft Azure (including Azure IoT Hub, Cortana Intelligence Suite, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI) to ingest millions of events per second, run analytics and predictive maintenance, and deliver new SaaS offerings. The move halved feature development time, freed ~11,000 developers to build differentiated applications, enabled faster global rollouts (China app in 3 months vs up to 1 year), and opened recurring‑revenue opportunities for contractors, utilities, and insurers.

Honeywell

Tom Rosback

VP Engineering/Chief Technology Officer, Connected Homes