ABB and Samsung bundle HVAC and building controls under one integrator

On November 9 in Suwon, South Korea, Chanwoo Park, executive vice president of Samsung Electronics' Device eXperience Division, and Mike Mustapha, president of ABB Electrification's Smart Buildings Division, signed an agreement that lets commercial building owners buy both companies' technology from one provider. A growing network of system integrators, trained on both product lines, will design, install and set up the whole job: lighting, climate, shading, access control and energy metering from ABB, plus HVAC, digital displays and appliances from Samsung.

ABB's announcement names offices, retail stores, restaurant chains, hotels and apartment buildings as the targets. Cooling Post covered the launch on November 10 and reported the same scope and the same pitch. When a project brings in many suppliers, each with its own systems, contracts and support, cost, time and risk all go up. Owners also have less visibility into a building's performance after it starts operating.

That last point is the one a facilities director will feel longest. Deciding which supplier installs which box is a one-time job. Deciding who answers for the building once it is open lasts for its whole operating life.

Both executives framed the deal around that operating burden. In ABB's announcement, Park said customers want B2B technology they can purchase, install and manage without difficulty. He added that selling it through local system integrator partners lets owners "focus on running their business." Mustapha put it more bluntly:

Two platforms, one stream of building data

The package does not make the owner run two software stacks. According to ABB, the customer picks either ABB Ability BuildingPro or Samsung SmartThings Pro as the building, energy and property management platform. A secure cloud-to-cloud integration shares building data between the two, giving the chosen platform visibility into connected systems, energy performance and operations. ABB-free@home handles smart home and building automation, ABB InSite handles energy monitoring, and room-level devices and sensors, including the full ABB KNX range, connect through BuildingPro Suites.

ABB's own summary of the deal is worth reading closely. It describes the ABB side as building automation, HVAC control and energy management, set against Samsung's HVAC equipment, displays and appliances, and it calls the owner's pick the "building intelligence platform, with data access from the other platform." That pairing suggests the boundary that usually causes trouble, between the HVAC equipment and the controls that run it, now sits inside one package rather than between two contracts.

Little of this technology is new. ABB says the offer combines integrations the two companies have built over several years: free@home and InSite with SmartThings and SmartThings Pro, and, most recently, BuildingPro with SmartThings Pro. The new piece is the sales and installation channel. The connections between products were already engineered. What changes is that one trained integrator can now quote, install and commission the whole set under one contract.

According to both companies, every solution is customized to fit what the building needs and what its owner prefers. Mustapha describes the channel as local integrators with deep knowledge of both technologies, able to pick the right combination for every individual building. That means the integrator's judgment, not a fixed bill of materials, decides what goes into each building.

For an owner, that makes the platform choice the decision with the longest life. The integrator picks hardware once, but the chosen platform is where operators will work every day, so it is worth deciding which team will use it before deciding which brand's hardware fills the ceiling.

What the gaps between packages cost

The case for one provider rests on a familiar construction problem. Every boundary between contractors is a place where information can get lost. In an October 8 analysis, Hii Life, a UK firm that delivers HVAC, AV, appliances and connected technology as a single scope, made that argument with industry figures. Its point is that when HVAC, AV, appliances and connected technology go out as four separate tenders, nobody owns the connections between them. A change to one scope then becomes a change to another scope's schedule, and each change is a chance for margin to leak into variations and claims.

The figures Hii Life cites come from two bodies of research. The Get It Right Initiative, reported by the Institution of Civil Engineers, estimates the direct cost of avoidable error in UK construction at about 5% of project value. HKA's CRUX research, reported by RICS, finds that change in scope is the leading cause of delays and disputes worldwide. Hii Life adds an honest caveat: these figures describe an industry pattern and should be checked against any specific scheme.

Most changes never become disputes, and none of these figures measures the ABB and Samsung offer. They do show where the money sits. The part worth paying for is the connection between systems: lighting, HVAC, access control and metering stop being the owner's coordination problem and become one integrator's contractual responsibility. Hii Life describes the alternative plainly: when a fault touches two scopes, two suppliers blame each other and the owner's team manages it into occupation.

Schedules are the other place the gaps bite. Four packages mean four programmes that depend on each other, Hii Life argues, and a late change costs more to absorb because procurement has already happened. It singles out appliances, which arrive last: a missed power or drainage connection is the kind of detail that stops a finished building from opening, and the main contractor carries the liquidated damages. Samsung's appliances sit inside this package, so the last items through the door would fall within the same integrator's plan rather than a separate supplier's timetable.

The handover is only the start of the bill. NIST's building systems program estimates that buildings account for 37% of U.S. energy use, and that more than 80% of a building's life cycle energy use comes from operating it, not from materials and construction. That is why the ABB and Samsung pitch about seeing performance after opening may matter more over time than the simpler install.

The same NIST program explains why that visibility is hard to get. Building components are seldom designed and installed in a coordinated way, it notes, yet overall performance depends heavily on how they interact, and performance often has to be measured over a year or longer. If that holds for a given building, the cross-system data feed is where an integrated package earns its keep, because the interactions NIST flags cannot be judged on handover day.

Where a single package may not pay

The single-partner argument has a real cost, and Hii Life names it. Combining scopes means less competition at tender and less direct control over each specialist. A quantity surveyor is right to want line-item visibility. The firm's answer is that a combined bid can still be broken down to the same line items as separate packages. Even so, it concludes that the coordination saving usually wins on a large, heavily serviced building and may not on a smaller, simpler one.

That boundary matters here, because many of the targets ABB and Samsung name, such as single retail stores and restaurant sites, sit at the smaller end. Regulation is heading into the same space. ABB notes that by the end of 2029, the EU's revised Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/1275, will apply its building automation and digitalization requirements to smaller non-residential buildings as well.

For an owner of many small European sites, the choice could become which automation package to buy and from whom. A package installed the same way at every site could tilt the math differently than a one-off project, though that depends on how many trained integrators actually serve the owner's locations.

The existing-building test

Mustapha set out his view of where demand sits in a Buildings column published October 14, about four weeks before the signing. He cited American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy analysis, based on U.S. Energy Information Administration projections, estimating that 62% of the floor space that will exist in the U.S. in 2050 was already built by 2022. He also noted that Building Performance Standards, which set performance targets for existing buildings, are being adopted in a growing number of U.S. jurisdictions. His author note says he has led the division since 2022, a business with annual revenues of $3.25 billion to $3.75 billion in 2025 across more than 100 countries.

The column also put a number on the pressure HVAC faces. Citing EIA data, Mustapha wrote that commercial buildings in the hottest parts of the U.S. are more than six times as energy-intensive for cooling as those in the coldest regions, and that EIA projects warmer conditions will increase cooling demand in commercial buildings. For a hot-climate portfolio, that suggests the HVAC half of this package is the cost line with the most room to grow, which makes seeing it on the same platform as the metering more valuable.

His advice to owners was to treat modernization as a series of steps rather than one project. That could mean improving how a building runs before major equipment wears out, or timing larger upgrades to planned refurbishments. Improvements, he wrote, can often be planned around existing maintenance, refurbishment and replacement cycles, which keeps disruption down.

He suggested starting with three questions: where the building is under the greatest pressure today, which improvements could create value across more than one area, whether cost, energy, resilience or occupant experience, and, as a final filter, which investments leave the building with more options later.

Read against that column, the platform choice gets more weight. An owner with an older building could, in principle, put the management platform and metering in first and add HVAC when the existing equipment is due for replacement. The joint offer describes a complete package, so whether integrators will quote it in stages is a question to ask early.

Questions to put to the integrator

For owners and project managers weighing the offer, these questions follow from what the companies and Hii Life have laid out:

1. Which platform, BuildingPro or SmartThings Pro, will be the main system, and which data from the other platform will operators actually see in it?
2. Will the bid be broken down to the same line items the quantity surveyor would get from separate packages?
3. Who is responsible for a fault that crosses HVAC and controls, through the defects period and after the building opens?
4. Do the power and drainage connections for appliances, the last items to arrive, sit in the integrator's programme?
5. How many integrators trained on both product lines serve the owner's sites, and can the package be installed in stages?

The final question carries the most uncertainty. ABB calls the integrator network growing, and for a multi-site owner, coverage decides whether the offer works across the portfolio or only at a few sites. The next fixed date is the EPBD's end-2029 deadline for smaller non-residential buildings, and integrator coverage in Europe before then is the signal to watch.