Watts, a Danish energy technology company, was inspired by EU legislation on climate change to create an energy-tracking application for domestic use. The result, Watts Energy Assistant, was the first of several products that Watts launched to help boost sustainability in the home. From the beginning, the small team utilized the Microsoft Azure platform to support all their applications and services, including Azure IoT Hub, Data Lake Storage, and Azure Databricks. Their “Microsoft for everything” approach helped the company scale up quickly to meet growing demand, reduce costs, and maintain a strict security posture, including General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance. Today, use of Watts products has grown exponentially, and the business continues to grow, with more services planned for the future.
“It is possible for us to have an ambitious strategy, despite being a small team, by utilizing the Azure platform.”
Per Madsen, CEO, Watts
In 2017, the European Union shared new legislation with the public about how the international organization planned to help fight climate change. Per Madsen, CEO of Watts, was watching closely. “Watts started as an innovation experiment that was directly inspired by EU legislation on fighting climate change,” he says. The Danish company, which creates technology and tools to help consumers monitor their energy consumption, took special note of one of the EU’s key recommendations: energy efficiency. “The EU identified energy efficiency as a top-level concern,” says Madsen. “Meaning that before you go out to build wind farms and solar panels, you have to learn to use energy more efficiently.”
At the same time that European governments were advocating for energy efficiency, advances in artificial intelligence and cloud computing were making an impact. For Madsen, it was a fortuitous mix. “With our first app, we wanted to engage consumers more in their energy consumption and build on previous models that relied on reviewing past consumption,” he says. Six years later, Watts has launched three solutions, Watts Energy Assistant, Watts Live, and Watts Home Grid, all of which utilize Microsoft Azure products and services. And, the business is at work on a fourth solution, Watts As A Service. By choosing to build its business on Azure, the small team at Watts has found an ideal solution for scaling their product, saving time, and staying compliant. “We are a small company that has been supercharged with all this Microsoft technology,” says Madsen.
Starting with a trusted platform
Watts’s first innovation was the Watts Energy Assistant app, designed to help people track their energy use and compare their energy consumption against a predicted budget, as well as providing insights into when energy is cheapest and what percentage of power comes from green sources. “We needed to build a trusted platform and take it in steps,” says Madsen. That meant selecting a cloud platform that the company could grow with. “We wanted to go cloud native from the beginning,” says Rasmus Bjerg, Product and Software Development Section Manager at Watts. “It became very natural to go with the Azure environment because we already knew the Microsoft .NET platform well,” he adds. The Watts Energy Assistant application uses Azure Machine Learning and Azure Databricks to help make predictions and suggest ways to optimize energy use. Watts’ first application built on the company’s goal to move consumers from a reactive to a proactive stance on energy consumption. “We wanted to make energy use more intelligent,” says Madsen.
After launching Watts Energy Assistant, the next innovation was Watts Live—a smart device that reads data from domestic energy meters and sends live information to the Watts app. To take the Watts family of applications to the next level, Bjerg and his colleagues again relied on Azure. “The Watts Live card automatically connects to Azure and Azure IoT Hub,” says Anders Spur, Section Manager, Research and Development at Watts. “By using Azure IoT Hub to connect devices to the Watts application, we have reduced the time it takes for households to gain insights into their energy use from two days down to five seconds,” says Spur. The result is a deeper level of granularity for app users and potentially even greater cost savings.
“As soon as people start using the app to track their energy use, they begin to reduce the base load of energy used in their homes,” says Bjerg. “We have seen anywhere from 100 to 300 percent reductions in base load once people start to consume real-time data about their at-home energy use,” he adds.
Following the success of the first two Watts products, a third, Watts Home Grid, was added. “The Watts Home Grid system is where we begin to deploy some more powerful technology in the home,” says Madsen. Using Azure IoT Edge, Watts Home Grid builds on the previous applications by deploying algorithms to balance energy use in any given household. “We are expanding the Home Grid system to include an EV charger, power trackers, and climate sensors,” says Madsen. “We view this as one route to net zero emissions.”
When building both the initial Watts Energy Assistant application and the Watts Live device, Madsen and his colleagues engaged the help of Microsoft partners. “We worked with twoday and GRINN as we developed these solutions,” says Madsen. “Because moving fast was a factor, the ability to work with partners who had experience in coding and hardware development helped us develop our solution faster, in the case of twoday, and benefit from GRINN’s proven experience in hardware design.”
“By using Azure IoT Hub to connect devices to the Watts application, we have reduced the time it takes for households to gain insights into their energy use from two days down to five seconds.”
Anders Spur, Section Manager, Research and Development, Watts
Staying focused on business goals, not infrastructure
Today, the Watts applications are supported by a microservice architecture that utilizes Azure Table Storage and Azure Blob Storage. “Our system contains 50 microservices that communicate using Azure Service Bus and run on Azure Event Hubs,” explains Bjerg. Watts employees also use Azure Data Lake Storage for, as Bjerg puts it, “experimental stuff.” “We have a whole team that uses Data Lake Storage to solve data and try out new algorithms,” he adds. “But, where you really see the benefit of the cloud is when we use Azure Databricks in conjunction with Data Lake Storage to run huge computations for a short period of time, and then close it down.” The results of those computations inform the algorithms at work in the finished Watts applications. “Data Lake Storage is a very important foundation of the analytics we are doing,” says Bjerg.
For Spur, the advantage of consolidating on an Azure environment is clear. “We use Microsoft for everything,” he says. “From day one, we chose to utilize the partnership we had with Microsoft and employ the full range of tools they have to offer. We use the performance of the Azure platform for elastic computing—having everything on one platform makes it easy to scale up and down and monitor the environment. And, minimizing time to market is another important aspect of choosing Azure.”
Bjerg agrees that a cohesive environment helps the small team at Watts save time and focus their attention on value-added activities. “Because of the quality of service we get with Azure out of the box, we can focus less on infrastructure elements and more on solving business problems,” he says. Watts has also found the Azure environment to be cost-effective: “Trying to lower our cost has always been a high priority,” says Bjerg.
By selecting the Azure platform, Watts benefited from a close collaboration with Microsoft. “We had a lot of cooperation with Microsoft,” recalls Bjerg. “The Microsoft team provided a lot of resources and shared new products with us that aligned with our roadmap.” While creating the Watts As A Service solution, Watts extended its engagement with Microsoft to include FastTrack. “Working with FastTrack, we collaborated on a strategy to build a platform that can handle input from at least 1 million electricity devices,” says Bjerg. “We gained guidance from the FastTrack team to find the best, highest-performing, and most cost-effective solution to a technical roadblock we were facing. We also received a lot of support on our architecture and decisions for which Azure services we will use in the new solution.”
Watts also chose the Azure platform to support its strict security posture. “The managed quality of Azure services makes it easier for us to stay compliant,” says Spur, who notes that the Watts team recently completed a compliance report on GDPR privacy policies. “We were able to answer a lot of the questions in the compliance report confidently because we knew that the security posture we get out of the box with Azure meets a lot of those requirements. As a startup, it would have been much more difficult to reach that high level of security and compliance alone.”
“We use the performance of the Azure platform for elastic computing—having everything on one platform makes it easy to scale up and down and monitor the environment.”
Anders Spur, Section Manager, Research and Development, Watts
Meeting the moment with scalability
In the six years since Watts first launched the Energy Assistant application, demand for energy-saving tools has skyrocketed. “Rising energy prices have hit people really hard,” says Madsen. “We have seen a huge increase in the usage of our app, and the desire to do more. We went from 150,000 users to 550,000 at the end of 2022.” The ability to quickly scale up to accommodate customer demand is a hallmark of cloud computing, and something the Watts team has taken advantage of with the Azure platform. “It is possible for us to have an ambitious strategy, despite being a small team, by utilizing the Azure platform,” Madsen adds. “We have a complex platform up and running in the cloud—we would have needed several hundred people to create it from scratch.”
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