Clockworks Analytics drives millions in energy savings annually, scaling with Azure

Hospitals, universities, office buildings, and other built environments are hubs of heating, cooling, lighting, and equipment that constantly draw on the electricity grid. The built environment consumes 32% of global energy, according to the UN Environment Programme.

Imagine if every building could effortlessly reduce energy consumption. “My mission is to have a massive positive impact on the built environment by empowering facilities teams. Our job is to figure how to do that by improving the bottom line for the businesses and institutions we serve,” says Nicholas Gayeski, Co-founder and Co-CEO at Clockworks Analytics, a US-based building analytics software company.

Streamlining building operations

Clockworks Analytics’s Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD) platform plugs into existing building systems for clients in more than 30 countries. It analyzes millions of data points, identifies the highest-impact performance issues, then provides root-cause diagnostics. For example, it can alert a building manager that the HVAC system is heating and cooling simultaneously—a common source of energy waste—and recommend steps to optimize performance and conserve energy.

The company manages more than 600 million square feet of connected real estate, delivering equipment performance data every five minutes for analysis. Clockworks is growing around 40% each year, which means thousands—even millions—more data points to process. “We needed to simplify cloud operations to support our growth and AI plans,” says John Anastasio, CTO and partner at Clockworks Analytics.

Optimizing infrastructure

To realize its vision of massive positive impact on the built environment, Clockworks required greater database scalability and flexibility. “Transitioning to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets really lets us optimize and streamline our analytics processes. We’re processing 40% more analytics now,” explains Anastasio. The company also needed more compute and concurrency, which it addressed with Microsoft Azure SQL Database Hyperscale and read replicas.

Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is a core component of Clockworks’s architecture, enhancing performance and reducing complexity around data collection and analysis. “There are a lot of Azure technologies that I love, and Azure SQL Database Hyperscale is one of my favorites,” Anastasio notes. He explains that Clockworks uses the Hyperscale tier to scale its database infrastructure with virtual cores instead of DTUs (database transaction units), providing significantly greater performance and scalability. This means Clockworks can support more customers and analytics workloads without bottlenecks.

By combining SQL Database Hyperscale, Azure Virtual Machines, and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Clockworks helps ensure its platform has the resources to handle high volumes—including spikes in demand. The company might pull batch analytics on all connected assets on the East Coast, for example. This large volume of data must be processed quickly to be available to customers when they need it. A few hours later, there might be no demand on the databases.

“Virtual Machine Scale Sets allow us to scale from 1 to 7,000 servers in a minute, to process analytics for any global time zone in under an hour. Previously, it took 20 minutes to spin up the servers,” observes Anastasio.

Clockworks also provides on-demand analytics, “and there’s no way to predict when a customer might initiate an action that requires a large batch of compute and a large batch of SQL connections and analytics,” explains Gayeski.

Ensuring security

The team turns to Microsoft Defender for Cloud for comprehensive cloud security protection, underpinning the scalability and flexibility that Clockworks needs. “Defender for Cloud is essential in safeguarding application servers, databases, storage, and the underlying network infrastructure,” notes Anastasio. “It delivers real-time threat detection, continuous security assessments, and integrated protection across the entire environment. This helps ensure customer data is processed and stored securely in compliance with industry best practices.”

Enabling sustainability

The fundamental service that Clockworks offers its customers requires the highest level of scalability and flexibility. Reed Powell, Operations Manager at MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions, a Clockworks customer, says, “With Clockworks, we have more trust in the data that’s coming out of the facilities and in the analysis engine they’re providing. Since our analyst team trusts the data, they do less verification and more consulting. So, rather than be data auditors, we’re able to be building consultants and make meaningful recommendations for energy efficiency.”

Clockworks’s FDD platform has saved customers $69 million in energy costs and 800,000 tons of carbon savings. With more capacity to serve its growing customer base, and to expand AI services, Clockworks is helping to actively reduce the built environment’s energy impact.

“With Microsoft, we can scale up, scale down, switch technologies, and migrate from one technology to another. Microsoft continues to build new services and features that solve problems. It’s an important collaboration for our mission,” says Gayeski.

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