Powermat is a pioneer in wireless charging, utilizing existing principles of magnetic inductivity to wirelessly transfer electricity in a safe and effective manner. The Powermat mobile engagement platform allows users to locate the closest power source, and operate a revolutionary wireless charging network. Consequently, Powermat partners are able to provide their customers with timely, relevant offers while they charge their devices, enriching their customer experience while increasing foot traffic and sales.
Together with more than 100 partners, including AT&T, DuPont, Starbucks, Duracell and General Motors, Powermat is building a wireless power ecosystem. By enabling public spaces, such as universities, airports and restaurants, partners can capture and engage new customers, increase sales, enhance customer loyalty and improve their overall mobile experience. Powermat is the only company combining an intelligent wireless charging solution with a powerful customer engagement platform.
As founding members of the Power Matters Alliance (PMA) Powermat is dedicated to creating an industry standard for smart and accessible wireless power.
Various parties within Powermat have different requirements that necessitate a flexible solution that can address multiple business needs. For example, the operations team often needs to answer questions such as: “How often do devices need to be connected?” and “Which devices need to be upgraded?” All the while, the marketing and sales teams strive to create an evolving user network with added value.
Solution
Powermat’s software team has built a system that is extremely flexible on every layer. The solution entails distributing the environment into manageable microservices. This way Powermat can take what is known and break it into small pieces to manage forward-moving business requests. In addition, AWS’ notion of everything “on-demand” provides continuous support for Powermat’s IT needs, removing the traditional capital investment risks that are associated with hardware purchases.
In addition, in order to address the ever-changing operations and business requirements, the solution involves building scrum-oriented teams of multidisciplinary software professionals. AllCloud cloud experts joined the force in order to create a trustworthy, fast and agile team, impervious to cultural differences with the ability to work across teams and companies.
There is a big difference between standard software and software that integrates with IoT hardware that is being developed. New hardware needs to be integrated and tested to make sure it works with Powermat’s software. The challenge here begins with the need to maintain multiple staging environments that are compatible with different versions of hardware. In addition, because these environments are isolated from production, new hardware needs to be easily integrated once it’s deployed in the field. The overarching challenge is making the process easy and not having to depend on traditional, cumbersome processes.
Solution
An environment should be able to deploy no matter where it is. In order to maintain different types of hardware, Powermat has to ensure that various versions of supporting software are created and organized accordingly. Additionally, maintaining different types of hardware requires various versions of supporting software to be created and properly orchestrated. By automating the end to end creation of Powermat’s cloud environment for testing purposes, hardware engineers can easily and quickly have a Powermat software stack replicated in the cloud that is dedicated for development and testing. The option to automatically build the complete stack from scratch and shut it down the same way enables speed, effectiveness, and efficiency by not utilizing unnecessary resources (e.g., terminating dev and test environments).
Currently, information is broadcast to users regarding the locations of available charging spots, which are spreading rapidly. With the huge influx of users expected in the coming years, it is critical to have great performance that provides the ultimate user experience. This means users need to be able to find the nearest available charging spot through the Powermat mobile app.
Solution
By utilizing the AWS infrastructure, Powermat is enabled with resource provisioning flexibility and has been able to remove the risk that accompanies an exponential growth in demand. In preparation for the influx, Powermat and AllCloud performed tests to simulate the predicted increase of wireless power devices and users.
As mentioned above, the need to maintain enterprise grade hardware and software generates a number of challenges. These include system upgrades and maintenance that must be executed without harming the quality of the service. With high customer expectations, Powermat needs to provide 24/7 solutions and support.
Solution
Instead of trying to understand or redefine how high availability is implemented, AllCloud’s architects opted to focus on how to deploy while charging. In order to reach users worldwide in the most efficient way possible, AllCloud experts set up Powermat’s service and backup to work across multiple AZs. With AllCloud, Powermat leverages advanced AWS services such as DynamoDB and SQS. As a result, the need to design architecture and deploy backup and DR solutions is simplified.
In addition, maintaining backward compatibility with each microservice is key. With every upgrade, a few resources that hold the previous version can upgrade seamlessly with backward compatibility without affecting user experience.