Johnson Controls opens cloud-based apps marketplace for building energy efficiency

The marketplace offers 17 apps so far, five of which were developed by third parties on the Panoptix platform, the company said.   Among others, these include apps that keep track of tenants' utilities, monitor buildings' energy performance and display the amount of carbon emissions each building, or group of buildings, is responsible for. The idea - expressed as "See a bigger picture" by Panoptix - is to help building owners and managers see energy trends across buildings, making it easier for them to find ways to reduce energy consumption, for example, or to see anomalies that could indicate fixable problems.   The apps are all based on Johnson Controls' Panoptix energy-management platform, introduced last year. The company earlier this month made its application programming interfaces (APIs) available to developers so they could begin designing apps for the marketplace.   This last weekend, Johnson Controls offered up the Panoptix APIs at GreenBiz's Hack City in a sponsored challenge. The winning challenge from InSite developed an app to benchmark building energy consumption and compare usage among other buildings in a portfolio. The building managers can then share these results through social media (Facebook and Twitter). Panoptix App Marketplace Johnson Controls