BQ: Powering mobile innovation
About BQ
BQ is one of the leading technology companies in Europe that designs and develops consumer electronics such as smartphones, 3D printers, and robotics. The company’s philosophy is to make technology a tool for improving the world and the lives of its users. More than 170 engineers work on BQ devices from conceptual design and mechanics to hardware and software development, production, and the QA process. BQ sells its mobile devices to more than 5 million customers in over 40 countries.
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Contact usUsing Google Kubernetes Engine and BigQuery on Google Cloud, BQ is providing better service at a lower cost, helping increase its time to market over much larger manufacturers.
Google Cloud results:
- Scaled to support more than a 2,000% increase in services with Google Kubernetes Engine on Google Cloud
- Able to thrive and grow in a competitive market
- Saved 60% in cloud hosting costs
Easily managed jump from 15 to 350 services
Travel most anywhere in the world and you’ll see people using smartphones for work, for play, and to stay connected with friends and family. As global demand for mobile technologies continues to soar, smartphone manufacturing has become an ultra-competitive business dominated by highly visible, global brands.
Just a few years ago, the idea that a small European company could compete with industry giants seemed unlikely, but that’s exactly what BQ did. The company realized that many people in Spain felt that they were paying too much for their phones and offered cost-conscious consumers what they wanted: excellent service and high-quality devices at a more affordable price.
The strategy worked, and demand for BQ products and services increased significantly across Europe. The company also found new ways to grow, becoming one of the top three 3D printer manufacturers in Europe. Suddenly, BQ went from providing services to several thousand local customers to having to provide reliable service and updates to millions of devices—a challenge difficult to manage using an IT infrastructure built on individual virtual machines.
“By moving to Google Cloud and Kubernetes Engine, we were able to scale quickly from 15 services to 350 services while reducing our cloud hosting costs by approximately 60%.”
—Pablo Moncada, IT DevOps Team Lead, BQTo scale quickly, BQ began migrating services to Docker containers running on Google Kubernetes Engine—built on the open source Kubernetes system. With Kubernetes Engine, BQ has a managed orchestration platform for Kubernetes to keep its small team focused on innovation rather than IT maintenance.
“Since we moved to Kubernetes Engine on Google Cloud, our development is much easier,” says Pablo Moncada, IT DevOps Team Lead, at BQ. “There is no extra work for our team in having to manage our extensive environment, allowing us to ship faster and to focus on more strategic projects.”
Better service at a lower cost with Google Cloud
In addition to streamlining management, BQ wanted to reduce costs while maintaining high availability. Google Cloud helped solve both problems.
By using preemptible (highly affordable, short-lived) Compute Engine instances with automated container management for fault tolerance, BQ gets the best of both worlds: highly affordable compute instances and high availability. It can, therefore, operate at a significantly lower cost and provide better service to customers and employees. Instead of running each cloud service on a separate node, BQ now runs 350 services on just 20 nodes.
“The combination of Google Workspace and Google Cloud empowers our small team of engineers to effectively serve BQ’s employees around the world.”
—Pablo Moncada, IT DevOps Team Lead, BQThe company also relies on Cloud SQL, which provides fully managed database services, freeing BQ engineers from operational tasks and performance optimization. With the help of Cloud SQL, the company’s engineers can improve development cycles and gain more time to work on projects that provide value to its customers.
“By moving to Google Cloud, we were able to scale from 15 services to 350 services while reducing our cloud hosting costs by approximately 60%,” says Pablo. “A team of three engineers is all we need to keep our environment running smoothly. Without Google Cloud, we would need three times as many people.”
Rich insights with BigQuery
BQ also uses BigQuery to quickly analyze information from millions of devices and application logs. Engineers and product development teams can then visualize metrics with Tableau and build custom reports and dashboards using Looker Studio and glean valuable insights that influence product development and customer services.
“We are constantly improving product quality based on user experience data analyzed with BigQuery. For example, we can tell if a hardware component such as an antenna is affecting smartphone performance, or understand how a software update is impacting battery life,” says Pablo. “To gather this intelligence, we query across multiple databases containing large stores of data, which would be impossible to do cost effectively without BigQuery.”
“With its expertise in a rapidly evolving technology landscape, Google is the perfect match for us in a world that demands constant improvement in services. Our goals align nicely with Google. We want to empower people with the right tools to work and play their best.”
—Pablo Moncada, IT DevOps Team Lead, BQTransparent and connected with Google Workspace
From day one, BQ built its business processes around Google Workspace, using Google Drive for an open, central storage platform; Google Sheets, Docs, and Calendar for transparent collaboration; Gmail for fast email searches and reliable message delivery; and Google Meet to maximize staff contact while saving on travel, video conferencing, and telecom costs overall.
“The combination of Google Workspace and Google Cloud empowers our small team of engineers to effectively serve BQ’s employees around the world,” says Pablo. “There’s instant, reliable collaboration between our teams worldwide. The Google Workspace products are especially optimized for mobile use, so any employee at any time can effectively communicate product challenges or opportunities that we can address to ensure continued delivery of world-class services.”
Staying one step ahead
With Google Cloud and Google Workspace, BQ can increase its market share and pave the way for future innovations. The company regularly collaborates with Google’s Android team and is currently testing the AI and machine learning products with the goal of enhancing its products with artificial intelligence.
“With its expertise in a rapidly evolving technology landscape, Google is the perfect match for us in a world that demands constant improvement in services,” adds Pablo. “Our goals align nicely with Google. We want to empower people with the right tools to work and play their best.”
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About BQ
BQ is one of the leading technology companies in Europe that designs and develops consumer electronics such as smartphones, 3D printers, and robotics. The company’s philosophy is to make technology a tool for improving the world and the lives of its users. More than 170 engineers work on BQ devices from conceptual design and mechanics to hardware and software development, production, and the QA process. BQ sells its mobile devices to more than 5 million customers in over 40 countries.