Dive Brief:

• Honeywell Technologies has rolled out fire prevention panels built on its Forge platform that are tailored to battery storage installations and data center customers. It expects the products to become growth drivers, CEO and Chairman Vimal Kapur said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call on Thursday. 
• “Early detection of fire [is essential] in very unique environments that have a lot of electrical cables, a lot of servers,” Kapur said on the call. “Unique new products for detecting fire in batteries [are important] as more and more lithium-ion batteries are being used.” 
• Forge is Honeywell’s platform for building operators, original equipment manufacturers and contractors to manage automation systems remotely. Introduced seven years ago, the platform remains a small part of the company’s revenue, but Kapur said it’s being set up to grow products and services going forward.

Dive Insight:

Building automation was the source of more than $2 billion of the $5 billion in revenue Honeywell generated in the quarter. The segment increased 8%, the eighth straight quarter of year-over-year growth, according to the company. 

The earnings release is the first since Honeywell spun off its aerospace division and started reporting income solely as a company that focuses on building, industrial and process automation.

Driving the revenue gains from building automation were double-digit growth in fire and security products, particularly for use in data centers, where sales were up 100%, Kapur said.  

The company has stepped up its product introduction cycle and is benefiting from “the mix-change of the end markets,” he said. “We continue to amplify our new-product introduction and [are] maintaining a very high vitality by which we then gain share from competition.”  

The Forge platform is key to growth, he said. Customers can easily increase their control over aspects of their operations by adding products to the platform, and it’s “very compelling for our channel partners because they save significant commissioning time, inspection time and improve their P&L,” he said.

An early product the company designed for the platform is a fire panel that building operators can configure remotely. From that and other early products,  the platform is now bringing in just shy of $1 billion in sales. “It pulls the core product,” Kapur said.

The platform also helps boost the company’s services business, he said. “Our customers connect to Forge, [and then] we are able to provide a higher-value outcome,” he said. We “get better insight into customers, energy consumption, predictive maintenance [and] emissions.”

On the security product side, Honeywell is leveraging a company it acquired two years ago, LenelS2, that provides video surveillance, access control and other types of physical security technology products. “We're benefiting from the very premium position of LenelS2,” Kapur said. “They continue to perform, with double-digit growth rates across the board.”

Honeywell acquired LenelS2 as part of its purchase of Carrier Global Corp.'s Global Access Solutions business. 

Kapur said he wants annual recurring revenue from Forge to grow 15%. “We want to have a high aspiration,” he said. “This year it probably will be slightly shy of that, more like 12%-13%, but we'll continue to work our way through to get closer to 15% every year.”