Johnson Controls and Pelion announce smart buildings partnership

Arm subsidiary, Pelion, the connected IoT device service provider, has announced a partnership with Johnson Controls, a leading developer of smart and sustainable buildings.

This partnership looks to accelerate innovation in connectivity, security and intelligence at the edge for Johnson Controls OpenBlue technology.

“This partnership combines Johnson Controls deep domain expertise in healthy buildings with Pelion’s device and edge management capabilities to usher in an era of truly smart, updateable facilities at cloud scale.” said Mike Ellis, chief customer and digital officer for Johnson Controls. “OpenBlue’s AI capabilities at the edge will consolidate diverse points of intelligence distributed across various floors, sites or even continents into insights and actions, creating an updateable building that can self-heal and evolve over its lifespan.”

Johnson Controls is applying software, multiple sensors and AI-trained models to the built environment and will leverage Pelion’s flexible device management capabilities to unite diverse device types and application layers to feed AI models that respond to dynamic workloads.

“Johnson Controls has the strategic foresight to rely on a partner to streamline the complexity of IoT device management security and secure firmware updates over the air,” said Hima Mukkamala, CEO of Pelion. “Pelion’s connected device platform will standardise the onboarding process for all systems, including the edge and endpoint devices that run on them, plus offer world-class public key infrastructure for secure and simple integration with third-parties.”

This secure, open and flexible approach to device management will allow OpenBlue to run any device and hardware configuration, from hardware gateways to constrained temperature sensors.

In order to provide sustainable, low cost and low power intelligent processing at the edge, the partnership will utilize proven energy-efficient processors from Pelion’s parent company, Arm, which are a key part of Johnson Controls’ distributed hardware deployment.