Rolling out IoT at high-speed
The IoT field represents a new growth frontier for Vaillant Group, where software is the product. Their goal is to harness data intelligently from heating appliances to deliver added customer value through safe, reliable, and user-friendly API services. This enables Vaillant Group to evolve beyond one-time sales of heating appliances and connectivity products to provide ongoing data-driven services.
In the 18 months following their cloud native stack launch, Vaillant's IoT team successfully deployed three major applications, demonstrating remarkable transformation speed.
Digital transformation has reshaped the heating technology industry. Vaillant Group's operations now encompass software development, IT services, and data-driven business models. This evolution from a traditional industrial company to an industrial-technology hybrid required active measures to ensure success, particularly in accelerating innovative product development.
Speed was crucial in building the supporting cloud native infrastructure, with a six-month timeline. While initially planning to use Kubernetes on Azure, evaluation revealed that ACS was reaching end-of-life and AKS lacked required functionality. The solution emerged as vanilla Kubernetes on Azure, with Giant Swarm's fully managed solution complementing Microsoft's offering to support the required business velocity.
Despite a mid-project technology change, the API developer program launched on schedule. Giant Swarm's integration two months into the project enabled completion within the original four-month timeline, avoiding delays beyond the six-month allocation.
About Vaillant
The Vaillant Group is a global market and technology leader in the fields of heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology. For over 140 years, they have been following a strategy designed to achieve sustainable and profitable growth. Today, the company has 10 sites in six European countries and China, manufacturing high-efficiency products.
In its bid to protect the environment, the Vaillant Group is working towards challenging targets: reducing CO₂ emissions by 25 percent, water consumption by 50 percent, and waste volume by 20 percent. Vaillant offers eco-friendly, energy-saving heating and ventilation systems worldwide, increasingly using renewable energy. These products are energy efficient and environmentally-friendly throughout their entire lifecycle — from development through production to service and recycling.
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