Xenon, Inc: IoT Proof of Concept Accelerates New Market Opportunities

Xenon, Inc. is a custom hardware provider offering full-service engineering, integration, and field service solutions for the oil and energy industries. The company provides process and environmental analytics, industrial instrumentation and automation, and electrical systems.

Though Xenon primarily serves industrial markets, the firm was approached in 2018 by a new customer interested in applying their industrial engineering background to building IoT solutions for optimizing home maintenance, monitoring, and asset protection. An institutional single-family residence company with a portfolio of thousands of homes, the client was particularly interested in testing automated door locks, water sensors, and other smart devices for secure access and efficient maintenance. Their proposed plan included deploying devices in vacant properties each month with a three-year installation phase.

Partnering with Xenon provided an opportunity to explore and validate the impact of installing IoT smart home solutions for improved customer experience and reduced operational costs. For Xenon, the project presented a new market outside of its industrial focus. To respond, they needed a proof of concept to test in the first 200 homes and present to executives.

Leveraging expert advice for faster proof of concept

Xenon began building the IoT platform in Amazon Web Services (AWS) on its own, but soon encountered issues. As hardware engineers, they realized they were outside their core competency and needed help from experienced solutions architects on software integration with their client’s property management system. They engaged Effectual to review their existing architecture and implement Well-Architected best practices.

Xenon’s primary challenge was creating a cost-efficient cloud architecture that could scale. When the Effectual team conducted an initial review of the company’s environment, we confirmed the existing software layer would require fundamental changes to meet their cost requirements. In addition, our evaluation revealed the platform was built on one computer with no staging environment and no redundancy. This existing environment jeopardized the long-term reliability and scalability of the platform.

Based on this analysis, our team estimated Xenon would quickly out-capacity their existing environment at 100 homes. This was insufficient, as they needed to prove they could scale rapidly to service the company’s expanding property portfolio. Effectual also felt Xenon’s small development team could benefit from mentoring and guidance on key concepts and AWS IoT Core best practices.

Key recommendations and outcomes included:

• Built a scalable, reliable proof of concept that met the client’s business requirements and budget
• Confirmed AWS as the right solution for expanding their offering
• Established DevOps best practices and trained internal team on processes
• Educated company on costs and complexity of creating an IoT solution on a traditional infrastructure with EC2, load balancers. Showed them the significant benefits of using a serverless framework to process IoT events from Amazon Kinesis and device command management.
• Developed 187 AWS Lambda functions for an estimated 40,000,000 events per month.
• Implemented Amazon Kinesis to collect, process, and analyze 60,000 incoming records per day (30 MB of streaming data per day) to provide reliable, real-time insights and rapid response capabilities.
• Deployed AWS API solution with an advanced logging and control layer for Xenon’s large scale IoT system to handle a high volume of burstable requests. Designed one gateway to ingest IoT alarms and events, and another to receive commands from external systems and applications.
• Implemented Amazon DynamoDB as the primary storage mechanism for scalability with all tables using On-Demand for capacity control.
  
  

With Effectual’s help, Xenon responded quickly with a functional, reliable proof of concept that addressed their client’s pain points and met their business requirements. They validated AWS as the best cloud solution for propelling their project forward and gained a solid understanding of AWS IoT services.

Results & Next Steps

For their client, the project provided a better grasp of the costs and resources needed to deploy smart home systems in their properties. It also revealed what checks and balances they need to put in place for their operations.

From Effectual’s perspective, these outcomes are precisely what a successful proof of concept project should accomplish. If the client does decide to roll out these systems to its entire portfolio, we look forward to helping Xenon revisit its current configuration with some new approaches to further unlock the potential of the AWS Cloud.