Carrier Corp., a maker of air conditioners and building management products with $18 billion in annual revenue, has selected Amazon Web Services Inc. as its preferred cloud provider.

AWS shared details of the agreement this morning. The cloud giant didn’t divulge any financial terms, but did say Carrier intends to move up to 70% of its 4,000 servers and 996 applications to AWS. The migration is part of a broader digital transformation project by the manufacturer to incorporate artificial intelligence capabilities into its hardware.

Charlotte, North Carolina-based Carrier is best known for its air conditioning units, but also sells a variety of other products including industrial refrigerators, building control systems and CO2 detectors among others. The company will use AWS to collect data from those systems, as well as analyze the data using the cloud platform’s AI services to improve the user experience.

Automated building management seems to be one of the use cases Carrier will pursue. As an example of a product it could build using AWS services, the company outlined a hypothetical facility control system that tweaks temperature, humidity and ventilation in different parts of an office building based on occupancy.

Carrier will also develop new software services to help customers “monitor, optimize, report on and forecast the performance and utilization of their IoT devices.” Those services might be similar to Smart Service, a cloud-based analytics tool the company launched in 2017 that gives building operators access to sensor data from Carrier systems.

Carrier will build out a data processing environment in AWS to power the planned features. As part of the effort, it will implement a data lake on S3 as well as adopt the cloud giant’s IoT Core platform for connecting devices to the cloud, IoT Analytics tool and IoT Events, which makes it possible to monitor devices for malfunctions.

Lastly, Carrier will collect data from internal operations to identify opportunities to improve efficiency in areas such as manufacturing. 

“AWS is the hyperscale platform on which we expect to turn connected product and ecosystem data into opportunities for segment growth, new market channels, and improved customer experiences,” Carrier Chief Digital Officer Bobby George said in a statement.

Photo: Carrier