Johnson Controls acquires edge AI software
13th January 2022
USA: Johnson Controls has completed the acquisition of FogHorn, a California-based developer of edge AI software for the industrial and commercial IoT solutions.
While financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, Johnson Controls stated that it had acquired Foghorn’s edge AI for its own OpenBlue smart buildings platform. As a result, FogHorn’s technical team will be integrated into the OpenBlue Solutions organisation. FogHorn’s headquarters in Sunnyvale, California will then function as an AI Hub for Johnson Controls.
“Value is increasingly being created by applying intelligence at the edge-device level to create real-time, secure, actionable insights,” said Johnson Controls CTO Vijay Sankaran. “By pervasively integrating Foghorn’s world class edge AI throughout our OpenBlue solution portfolio, we are accelerating the pace towards our vision of smart, autonomous buildings that continuously learn, adapt and automatically respond to the needs of the environment and people.”
Johnson Controls maintains that as the number of sensors and amount of data in buildings continues to grow exponentially, the value of processing data and applying intelligence at the edge, without having to send data to the cloud, becomes increasingly pronounced.
Sastry Malladi, who served as chief technology officer at Foghorn, will join Johnson Controls, reporting to Sankaran as vice president, OpenBlue Artificial Intelligence.
