BALTIMORE — Danfoss has entered into a collaboration with Microsoft to bring domain expertise in refrigeration and HVAC to the cloud. Through this collaboration, customers will benefit from long-standing industry knowledge on a new platform powered by Microsoft Azure. The new cloud services will enable major savings, operational efficiency and can further increase sales effectiveness for refrigeration and HVAC system owners and professionals.

Accelerating the digital transformation

With this collaboration, Danfoss will extend its application expertise and become a recognized independent software vendor (ISV). Together, Danfoss and Microsoft will bring modern technology and domain expertise to refrigeration and HVAC system owners and professionals.

The cloud-based services will enable food retailers to reduce food loss, reduce energy consumption, and optimize overall store performance. They will benefit from Danfoss’ 80-plus years of experience as a solution provider in refrigeration and HVAC. The cloud infrastructure of Microsoft™ Azure will provide scalability and data security.

IoT makes business operation simple, efficient, and more effective

For food retail stores today, operations are getting increasingly complex. Staying compliant as well as reducing food loss requires a lot of manual work. Ensuring that refrigeration, lighting, HVAC, etc. run efficiently can be time-consuming and often requires specialist knowledge. With more assets getting integrated with renewable energy, e-mobility, and decentral energy systems on the rise, new potential but also complexity is introduced for food retailers. The result can be that stores end up spending more time and energy to run daily operations.

The Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite enables full transparency around the clock allowing food retailers to focus on the core of their businesses. The cloud-based services increase operational efficiency by processing and analyzing data from refrigeration assets, HVAC, lighting, and other assets. The data is managed in a secure way and delivers valuable insight to the food retail store in easy-to-use user interfaces.

“We bring more than 80 years of domain expertise and leadership in cooling & refrigeration solutions to a world-class cloud solution” notes Dr. Jan-Hendrik Sewing, Danfoss’s senior vice president, electronic controllers and services division and global head of Danfoss’s food retail vertical. “The Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite will help food retail stores focus on their core business by optimizing and automating current processes as well as providing actionable insights by bench marking stores to identify top and low performers. This will lead to reduced operational costs and energy consumption and an increase in sales and marketing effectiveness.”

With the Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite, food retailers will be able to eliminate up to 80% of the time used to manage issues with store equipment as the connected assets are monitored and analyzed ensuring immediate action in case of compressor failure, refrigerant leaks, or other issues. They will also realize up to 40% reduction in food loss as temperature is automatically monitored and alarms are sent to the store if temperature thresholds are above limit. Finally, stores can realize above 30% total net savings energy consumption by peak load shavings and reducing energy consumption from lights, refrigeration, HVAC, and other electrical appliances.

Realizing operational costs and reducing energy consumption with the Danfoss Cooling Cloud Suite is easy as sensors, controls, and gateways can be retrofitted in any store. The services are cloud-based and require no on-premises hosting allowing rapid deployment and scalability for any store needs.

“With Danfoss’s application expertise, we see a great opportunity to add value in the food retail sector,” said Paul Maher, general manager of industry experiences at Microsoft. “With Danfoss, we bring one of the strongest IIoT use cases to date in refrigeration to our customers. The implementation brings tangible value to food retail today and other industries in the near future. We look forward to supporting our joint customers meet their efficiency and sustainability goals.”

More developments on the horizon

“The collaboration with Microsoft will deliver tangible results to both existing and new customers of Danfoss and Microsoft,” said Jürgen Fischer, president, Danfoss Cooling. “We will build on this collaboration and continue to invest in new cloud services to the industries we have served successfully for more than 80 years with the ambition to reduce food waste and energy consumption.”

For more information, visit www.danfoss.us.