Industries
Hardware is the easy half
Putting a sensor on a thing, or a connected feature in a car, is a solved problem. Turning a fleet of them into software somebody can act on - reliably, at telecom standards, for as long as the hardware stays on the road - is where the work actually lives.
Connected vehicles, devices, and the platforms above them.
What connected products demand
The device is not the product.
Every connected programme we have worked on has found the same thing: the prototype proves the hardware, everybody celebrates, and then the real project starts. What follows is an infrastructure problem wearing a product's clothes, and it tends to arrive about six weeks after the party.
Signal you can trust
Devices drop, duplicate, arrive late and occasionally lie, and a vehicle spends a good part of its life somewhere with no coverage at all. A platform that assumes clean telemetry works beautifully in the lab and falls over in the field, so ingestion has to be built for mess rather than surprised by it.
Environments as code
A fleet outlives the team that launched it, usually by years. When the whole environment is defined as code, a new engineer can rebuild it and an auditor can read it, which is the difference between a platform and an installation somebody once performed and then left.
Someone has to run it
Connected products do not really have a launch date, they have a start date. Who is on call, how a firmware change ships, what happens at 3am in a market eight hours ahead: that operating model is part of the architecture rather than a phase that comes after it.
How the pieces fit
Signal to decision.
Things emit, one gate normalises, three lanes carry it, one surface makes it legible. The gate is the part nobody demos and the part everything else depends on, and the dashed line around the middle is the bit that matters five years in: the whole of it defined as code, so it can be rebuilt rather than remembered.
Devices
Different kinds of thing, all emitting.
- Vehicle
- Sensor
- Gateway
- Fleet app
Ingest
One gate normalises everything that arrives - and the gate itself is defined as code.
Three lanes
Out of the gate, running concurrently.
- Stream
- Store
- Alert
One dashboard
Signal somebody can actually act on.
How we help here
The parts of this we build.
This is platform and infrastructure work first, with an interface on top, which is why it draws almost entirely on the technology side of the studio and why the conversations usually start with an architect rather than a designer.
The work
A platform, a mobility business, a connected product.
The cloud foundation under KDDI's Musashi platform, built to the standards a telco audits against. A carmaker's move into branded mobility, prototyped fast enough to test the business case before anyone committed to it. And the digital layer around a connected eBike, from rider experience through to fleet management.
Panasonic
A connected eBike, prototyped
Prototyping the digital layer around the bike - rider experience, telemetry and fleet management - to show how Panasonic could lead in smarter, more connected cycling.
Talk to us
Got the hardware, stuck on the software?
If the thing works and the platform around it is what is holding the programme up, that is exactly the shape of problem we are built for.