The assessment, covering chiller systems in buildings in North America, pitted Johnson Controls against global peers and roundly praised the company's technology and customer service as market leading.

'Chiller systems can account for 40% of a building's total energy demand and they are one of the biggest targets for greenhouse gas reduction,' said Vijay Sankaran, chief technology officer, Johnson Controls. 'By installing connected chillers, or adding connectivity to existing equipment, we can optimise how a system works - reducing failures and lowering a building's total energy draw to make serious inroads into its CO2e footprint. The chiller product is itself key but so is the connected digital solution; particularly the AI-enabled predictive and remote diagnostic abilities delivered by our OpenBlue platform.'

OpenBlue Services for Chillers takes advantage of real-time data drawn from more than 200 data collection points on each piece of equipment. For example, monitoring the temperature a chiller is operating at. The data gathered is compared to a model of a 'perfect chiller,' a model created from Johnson Controls own statistical data compiled over more than 20 years. In the case of temperature monitoring, an alert is generated if the system readings are off by as little as half a degree from the expected range. This sort of insight allows the OpenBlue chiller experts to identify and deal with potentially critical system issues before they can cause a breakdown. The services are offered for Johnson Controls equipment and products supplied by others.

'Johnson Controls is highly customer-focused as they pay attention to client needs very broadly as well as offering focused market-leading capability with their OpenBlue Services for chillers,' said Dennis Marcell Victor, Frost & Sullivan industry analyst. 'We were impressed with the proactive AI-enabled capability of OpenBlue especially its ability to extend equipment life and cut downtime in half while generating significant annual energy savings. It's exactly why we awarded them the Best Practices Customer Value Leadership Award for 2022.'