Copeland is best known for the hardware that keeps modern life running. Its scroll compressors and HVACR technologies quietly heat and cool buildings and help protect temperature-sensitive goods in supermarkets, national retail chains, and other industries. But inside the company, a much smaller team operates with a different mandate. In Software Solutions, engineers build and run cloud platforms that monitor, control, and analyze equipment in the field. The work looks far more like a modern SaaS operation than a traditional manufacturing function.
One of those platforms is Connect+, which Copeland uses to monitor and control refrigeration controllers in grocery and large-format retail environments where uptime directly affects food safety and operations. As Brian Haggard, Technical Director for Software Solutions at Copeland, puts it, Connect+ supports “the controllers that you see in big box retailers,” including “those long aisles of frozen and refrigerated food.”
When Copeland became a standalone company following a divestiture from Emerson Electric, the team faced a hard deadline. Connect+ was running in Emerson’s Global Data Center, and that environment was being shut down. “The entire thing was being sunset,” Haggard explains. “We had to move.”
Copeland did more than relocate infrastructure. The company used the transition to modernize Connect+ and establish an operating model built for scale, security, and reliability with Azure. The effort included migrating the Connect+ customer environment and application workloads from on-premises operations to Azure, followed by a broader Phase 2 modernization initiative known internally as Connect+ 2.0.
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