IoT & data integration to enable growth
ABOUT THE COMPANY
As a white-label smart home platform, Pepper was growing rapidly in the consumer IoT arena. The company was entering new markets and reaching several major company milestones as it enhanced its platform to help users more easily control everything in their homes—from lights and thermostats to air purifiers and pet feeders.
OPPORTUNITY
Company leadership wanted to continue to improve the Pepper product, primarily by giving it the capability to support other devices not developed or made by Pepper (which operate on a variety of other tech stacks), as well as building ingestion services for data coming from various IoT devices and external clouds.
The company also wanted to create new feature enhancements for specific pages within the Pepper app. However, the team was under a significant time crunch on these improvements and needed a partner that could be quick and nimble, while also having specific expertise in engineering cloud services.
SOLUTION
Pepper partnered with 27Global for the project, not only because of the team’s experience with AWS cloud services but also its ability to leverage offshore teams to move quickly on the work. The initial scope for five months included several key milestones:
- Create an ingestion service for external cloud (Tuya) device event data
- Stand up support to display and trigger device automations and scenes imported from an external cloud
- Enhance the capability for event-related push notifications
- Complete the desired feature enhancements for the app’s device activity log
- Implement UI uplifts for Activities, Automations, and Scenes tools, and in-app banners
As an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), the 27Global team was able to leverage several AWS services in its work, including:
- AWS Lambda – This service was leveraged in several ways, including calling other Lambdas that acted as backend services, calling Kubernetes resources in the EKS cluster, or pushing messages to SQS or SNS.
- Amazon S3 – Due to their scalability, data availability, security, and performance, S3 buckets were utilized for hosting media files from users’ devices that could then be accessed or shared via the Pepper application. This data is siloed.
- AWS CodeCommit – This served as the initial code repository and source control system.
- EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) was utilized for orchestrating auto-scaling of the containerized Pepper application.
After the initial five months of work, Pepper extended 27Global’s contract for another four months to expand cloud integration and application capabilities—specifically to provide full read/write support for Tuya Automations and Scenes, as well as fully build out the Scenes feature for native Pepper smart home devices.
The team was also asked to build out full Activities, Automations, and Scenes support for four new devices to be sold at a large, nationwide retailer.
RESULTS
Not only did the 27Global team complete the work within the assigned time frame, but the partnership allowed Pepper to meet its own deadlines and stay on schedule. In addition, the team provided further consultation on the app’s design that helped ensure dependencies with other teams – as well as future improvements – were considered in the most efficient way.
Justin Larsen, vice president of technology at Pepper, said the partnership was extremely valuable to the company’s continued growth:
“The 27Global team has excelled in delivery and project support for Pepper,” he said. “Among all of our external project teams, their support, organization, and partnership for technical solutions has been best-in-class. They have a professional team and have quickly earned the trust of our internal staff, helping us to scale quickly and more effectively than with other groups.”
And David Bottoms, Pepper’s CFO, said he appreciated the level of customer service they received from 27Global.
“They do world-class development work and have a great customer-first approach to running their business. I could not be happier with the working relationship, the quality of the work, and the way they treat us.”
READY TO PARTNER? CONTACT 27GLOBAL TODAY TO GET STARTED.
