In Short
GEM One (TVH Holding) built a digital business & state-of-the-art IoT platform on Google Cloud, together with partner Devoteam G Cloud
Technologies implemented include a Cloud-native architecture, managed services & microservices, data and analytics & CI/CD on Google Cloud
First results indicate up to 20% in IT cost savings
The most important reason why we chose for Google Cloud is because we feel Google is the Cloud provider that is the strongest in the field of data and analytics. Google is best-in-class and a game changer when it comes to data connections, data transformation and data analytics.
About GEM One
GEM One is a brand of TVH Parts Holding, a global leader and one-stop shop for parts and accessories for material handling, industrial and agricultural equipment.
As part of ongoing innovation and service delivery, GEM One’s mission is to provide Smart monitoring solutions for mobile industrial equipment. The company boosts the productivity of off-road fleet by providing solutions in 4 key performance domains: Track and trace, Security and safety, Operational Efficiency & Service and Maintenance.
The Challenge
GEM One wanted to build a strong Cloud-only foundation for its digital business platform and industry-leading industrial-equipment monitoring solution. The digital business platform of GEM One is based on the data that is generated by mobile industrial equipment machines. These machines have IoT generated data on board and provide a valuable source of data.
The digital business platform GEM One wanted to build consists of several components, with data analytics and an IoT platform at the core. Other required capabilities for the intended platform were the customer experience, an ecosystem to bring partners and stakeholders together, and the underlying IT operations system with a.o. a CI/CD pipeline.
It was clear that to successfully set up their digital business and IoT platform, they need a Cloud foundation that could scale globally from day one. Knowing that TVH Parts has an own market customer base of more than 66,500 customers over the globe, GEM One needed a platform that was Cloud-native from the start.
The GEM One teams working on the smart monitoring products also needed guidance, training and best practices from Google Cloud experts to get the right Cloud foundation from the beginning.
The Goal
The goal of GEM One together with partner Devoteam G Cloud was to define a Cloud-native architecture from the start of the development of this platform and of their products. This architecture would allow to tap directly into the benefits of managed services and optimised operations in the Cloud.
Therefore, the company needed a state-of-the-art solution with the ability and flexibility to scale easily. And a trusted advisor partner to support the internal team in their operations.
In our search for a Google Cloud partner we chose for partner Devoteam G Cloud because of their proven core competences in data and analytics. So we knew they could support us with our digital business platform, that has data and analytics at the essence of the platform. We relied on Devoteam G Cloud’s expertise to know how we could best handle Google Cloud solutions like Pub/Sub, DataFlow, BigTable, BigQuery, etc. and put it all together in a correct and consistent IoT architecture
Solution
GEM One chose Google Cloud as the best Cloud vendor to build their digital business platform, because of the powerful data and analytics capabilities Google provides.
Google Cloud Premier Partner Devoteam G Cloud helped GEM One to set up their digital business platform, with a state-of-the-art IoT Platform and Cloud-native architecture on the Google Cloud as the main components. Several important strategic choices were made: to build the platform as a full Cloud platform with Google Cloud-native components and managed services as well as microservices.
Devoteam G Cloud’s team defined a clear and pragmatic approach to help the technical teams at GEM One to get up to speed very quickly on the concepts of Google Cloud Platform. Together, the teams laid out a Cloud-based architecture for the digital business and IoT platform, and a plan to build out this platform efficiently.
Devoteam G Cloud shared best practices on infrastructure-as-a-code, microservices, security, data storage, backup and retention policies, and how CI/CD in Google Cloud can be implemented.
Once the solution was implemented, GEM One was onboarded into Devoteam G Cloud Customer Success Services for the OPTIMISE phase, which consists out of proactive support of GEM One to optimise their operations and to discover new Cloud services that can help the business move forward. In the ongoing, long-term phase of the partnership, partner Devoteam G Cloud is helping the GEM One teams with ad-hoc consultancy to reach their objectives.
One of the challenges that we had to, and still have to, overcome is the novelty of the technology of this state-of-the-art platform we’re building. You have to make the right architectural choices from the start to create a long-term strategy for data collection, transformation and analytics. Also to include the right machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. That’s where partner Devoteam G Cloud’s expertise was essential, to help us to get this puzzle right architecturally and to fit efficiency, cost-effectiveness, security and scalability in all components.
The Result
The project with Devoteam G Cloud and Google Cloud to set up our digital business platform enabled us to go to the market as a competitive business with a state-of-the-art, cost-effective and flexible IT architecture which we can use for the long term support and most optimal service to our customers.
The most important result of the partnership between GEM One and Devoteam G Cloud is the fully operational digital business and IoT platform that runs on a Cloud-native architecture. Currently there are more than 25,000 machines that run on the platform and that store and send terabytes of data.
The data is processed in a cost-effective and flexible way. And the architecture is set up in such a way that the platform’s capacity can be scaled easily and quickly if needed.
The entire delivery and maturity, as well as the security of the GEM One software development processes increased.
Partner Devoteam G Cloud managed to set a strong foundation and Google Cloud architecture in place at GEM One. The Devoteam G Cloud team also successfully onboarded their technical team to the different concepts of Google Cloud.
A range of reports and a monitoring stack was set up for each component of the Google Cloud architecture, so that costs and problems in applications can now be monitored closely by GEM One. This enables the organisation to quickly track and react upon eventual issues with their apps. Following the best practices of Site Reliability Engineering, which allows amongst other things for Service Level Agreements with GEM One customers to be met very fast.
As a result of all efforts, GEM One was able to reduce operating costs significantly with at least 20%.
Partner Devoteam G Cloud is now further assisting GEM One on an ad-hoc basis with Google Cloud expertise.
Whenever we have a problem or challenge, we can count on the expertise of our partner Devoteam G Cloud to come up with best practices and the best way to solve the issue. Most of all for problems where we don’t have enough in-house knowledge to solve them, there is always a Devoteam G Cloud team member that can help with his or her own expertise or to escalate to a Google specialist for rare cases
