Johnson Controls is leveraging its large field resources, manufacturing investments and product launches to get more of its thermal management and controls business into data centers, CEO Joakim Weidemanis said on the company’s second-quarter earnings call this week. The company is seeing strong growth in the life sciences sector as well, particularly among large-scale companies that need Johnson Controls’ ability to manage large, complex thermal challenges, he said. 

“With the rise of biologics-based therapies, the manufacturing environments are materially different from the historical manufacturing environments,” Weidemanis said May 6. “The indoor operating conditions that they require [need] strong thermal management — which is not just HVAC but also controls. And because these are large campuses with thousands and thousands of employees moving in and out every day, and the value of what they manufacture is very high, it also requires other solutions in our portfolio.”

For the quarter, the company reported 8% year-over-year revenue growth to $6.1 billion and 30% growth in its order backlog to $20 billion. 

Orders in the Americas grew 40%, led by systems, which grew 57% year over year. Sales grew 7% year over year to $4.1 billion, led by its applied HVAC, which grew by high-single-digits. 

The company in April introduced two chiller platforms directed at data centers. The first is the York YDAM, which Weidemanis said delivers up to 3.5 megawatts of cooling in a compact footprint and provides 20% higher capacity density than competing options while enabling warm water cooling for advanced graphics processing units — the main technology in data centers. The second is the York YK-HT, which Weidemanis said has the industry's widest operating range. The YK-HT also supports waterless heat reduction, which Weidemanis said can eliminate up to 9 million gallons of cooling tower water annually in typical deployments.  

Orders for the two launches are just starting to come in, he said. “It's more about what's to come,” he said. “The two new chiller platforms … extend our leadership in high-density data center cooling.”

The company operates in three categories in the data center space, according to material made available for the call: chillers, mission-critical air handling units, or CRAHs, and coolant distribution units, or CDUs. 

The CDUs are the company’s newest product — added just a few months ago — which are intended to be part of a broader package of data center solutions. “The thermal architecture for data centers [tends to] evolve,” Weidemanis said. “So the roles that certain devices play today might evolve a little bit over time, and [that’s] why we chose to add CDUs to our portfolio — to be able to lead in that and be able to be a player that helps our data center customers with the most optimal and highest performing thermal architecture, not just for today, but in the future as well.”

The company is working with large customers on reference designs, or custom designs that could become models for future standardized systems based on the direction the industry thinks data center design is going as chips get more powerful. 

“They're really for the benefit of data center designers and operators as they're working on designing the next generation of data centers,” Weidemanis said. “We did a lot of work with NVIDIA.”

Weidemanis said Johnson Controls’ manufacturing base is a competitive advantage because it enables the company to meet aggressive time frames for its customers, especially since those time frames can change suddenly. 

“When larger customers are negotiating or looking at placing larger orders for a number of data centers that they're planning over the next couple of years, one of the factors they do look at in vendors is their ability to deliver,” he said. “It's the reliability of proof points and the ability to turn things around quickly.”

New manufacturing capabilities the company put in place in recent years has given it flexibility to speed product deliveries if needed, he said. “We made significant investments in physical plant and machinery … so we more than tripled our physical capacity,” he said. 

The company is also ramping up its business on the services side. It has introduced what it calls a Smart Ready Chiller that provides more performance data over the cloud — 10 times more data than other cloud-connected chillers, according to company material. This gives customers more of a reason to enter into long-term service contracts with the company, Weidemanis said. 

“This gives us and our customers deeper insights from day one, allowing us to shift more customers into proactive, recurring service relationships that improve reliability, reduce unplanned downtime, and lower life cycle costs,” he said.

The company reported 9% growth in its services business for the quarter.