Data brings everything to life, now even your company’s office buildings. Johnson Controls shows what the building of the future will look like in the OpenBlue Innovation Center.

The morning hustle and bustle is still in full swing when we get off the train in Rotterdam Centraal. We left Brussels early in the morning. Although we certainly don’t have to complain: as we leave the station, we meet an employee from Johnson Controls who had already boarded the train in Paris at half past six to visit his Dutch colleagues. The train also proves to be the right means of transport, because we find out later that the morning rush hour is not always easy for our northern neighbors.

Of course we didn’t travel to Rotterdam without a reason. At the Johnson Controls office in the Dutch port city, which serves as the headquarters for the entire Benelux region, we witness the grand opening of the newest OpenBlue Innovation Center. Daniela Pandrea, Managing Director of the company for Benelux and Scandinavia, cut the symbolic ribbon.

The building in Rotterdam is a suitable place to set up the first innovation center on European soil for several reasons, explained Pandrea in her opening speech. Rotterdam is the gateway to Europe. For her colleague Richard Lek there is an additional reason to be happy about this choice: He is playing a home game. Lek can’t hide his smile as he greets us.

Playground for IoT

Pandrea describes the brand new OpenBlue Innovation Center as a “laboratory for innovation”. The company wants to demonstrate its vision for the future of construction. The laboratory is intended to be a real playground for discovering IoT technologies, but enthusiasts for heat pumps and cooling systems will also get their money’s worth.

We don’t immediately notice that the Dutch headquarters of Johnson Controls has to represent the building of the future. Outside some TV screens with stock footage from IoT resp Smart Cities and a doll with VR glasses, some futuristic elements were added to the set. What interests us most is a large panel with live images from the surveillance cameras in and around the building.

So the beauty of the OpenBlue Innovation Center lies in what cannot be seen with the naked eye. Akaash Roktoe makes that clear to us. We’re in a meeting room that looks ordinary at first glance, but sensors behind the walls are closely monitoring what’s going on.

“These sensors can detect movements in a room, for example, but also temperature and air quality. This information is visible through an application or panels inside and outside the room,” says Roktoe. He points to a platter on the table that had previously escaped our attention. “By connecting all these sensors and the installations in the building, you can, for example, automatically turn off the lights or turn down the heating when a room is not in use.”

OpenBlue

The technology designed to handle all of this is called OpenBlue. Johnson Controls introduced the IoT platform in 2020. Like a savvy pastry chef, Johnson Controls built this platform like a layered cake. The pie that makes the IoT pie palatable is this Open blue bridge which brings together all the data generated by the sensors.

This data is sent to the OpenBlue Cloud via a secure gateway. Johnson Controls has entrusted the keys to Microsoft Azure for this purpose. “Security is the most important thing for us. We have found that Microsoft Azure offers the best guarantees and is therefore more interesting to us than building our own data centers,” explains Roktoe.

Now you might be wondering what to do with this data. In order to spice up the cake and make the data available to customers, the company has developed three applications that users can easily control with their smartphones. During our visit we see a brief demonstration of these applications, each with its own usefulness.

For example, OpenBlue Companion allows you to reserve meeting rooms and see what facilities are available in each room. The Enterprise Manager describes Johnson Controls as the “glasses” for your building. The application provides insight into the energy consumption in each room of a building, but can also show you, for example, the performance of the installations.

Finally, there is the location manager, who provides insights into the use of the individual rooms. This application also offers the possibility to connect all kinds of IT devices. So it finally becomes clear to us what this large camera wall in the reception area is used for.

Sustainable comfort

In the OpenBlue Innovation Center, companies can discover what a smart, connected building has to offer. Johnson Controls has three main goals: Healthy People, Healthy Places, Healthy Planet. This means that a building must offer comfort and security for the people who live or work in it, but it must also be sustainable.

“Ninety percent of a company’s costs are directly or indirectly related to its workforce,” says Roktoe. “Research has shown that good environmental conditions have a positive effect on employee productivity. We want to take care of the entire life cycle of a building and help customers find the optimal balance between well-being and sustainability.”

Even in building management, which is a current topic in times of hybrid working, companies can make smart decisions based on data. Roktoe clarifies with a real-world example: “We recently had a client who ran out of meeting rooms. Analysis showed that they were not using the available space efficiently. By setting up other smaller rooms and using flexible workspaces, they were able to solve their problem without having to move to a larger building. This saved them significant costs and employee frustration.”

Johnson Controls also wants to play the topic of sustainability prominently in the OpenBlue Innovation Center. Not only through the green plants on the walls, but also through the immersion of the visitors in the demo version. This is a virtual tour in which the company shows how data can be used to reduce energy consumption through eight chronological steps in a fictitious building.

“Carbon emissions are one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today,” we hear from Eamonn Hughes, one of the driving forces behind OpenBlue, who traveled all the way from Ireland to witness the opening in Rotterdam. “European legislation requires all buildings to be carbon neutral by 2028. Sustainability is no longer a choice; Businesses need to act now before it’s too late.”

The next step is that buildings can make autonomous decisions based on data.

Eamon Hughes, Johnson Controls

From smart to autonomous

Johnson Controls believes it can address the sustainability issue from a unique market position. Hughes: “OpenBlue might have been built from the ground up, but it didn’t come out of nowhere. We are not a “new kid on the block”, but have been committed to sustainability since our founding in 1885. With OpenBlue, we started the evolution from traditional to smart buildings. The next step is for buildings to be able to make autonomous decisions based on the data.”

Over lunch we chat with Richard Lek, who makes it clear that Johnson Controls also had to evolve. “We started this transformation about five years ago. Even then, sustainability was on the agenda, but government pressure accelerated everything. We can approach sustainability from a meta-level because we include product development alongside facility management. We are in a constantly evolving market; So I like to think of our company as a 140-year-old start-up.”

The future that Johnson Controls proposes at OpenBlue Innovation Controls in Rotterdam is not far off. It won’t be long before your company’s buildings are covered with hidden sensors that measure everything accurately. Soon the walls will literally be able to talk.