Clarify: Using data to make traditional industries more efficient and sustainable
About Clarify
Clarify is helping make traditional industries more efficient and sustainable by connecting people with data. Since 2012, it has helped industry leaders including Bolaks, Orkel, and JM Hansen get to grips with their data.
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About Devoteam
Devoteam G Cloud is a Google Cloud partner for over a decade and a Google Cloud Managed Services Provider. Their team of 500+ Google experts with 8 Google Cloud Specialisations helped hundreds of organisations grow with Google Cloud, and moved over 1 million users to Google Workspace. In 2022 Devoteam was named Google Cloud Reseller Partner of the Year (EMEA) for the third time in a row.
Faster speeds, better performance, and a secure infrastructure allowed Clarify to offer an industry-leading product that's easy to use, collaborative and scalable.
Google Cloud results
- Flexible platform that enables both small-scale experimentation and innovation on an industrial scale
- Efficient data processing at a cost 70% lower than previous cloud provider
- Speedier results with 99.8% faster load times produce an industry-leading customer experience
- Reliable cloud architecture that frees up developers' time by 75% and boosts productivity as a result
Powering fast visualizations of time-series data
Traditional industries like manufacturing, energy, aquaculture, and transportation are undergoing a seismic shift, as workforces move away from manual, paper-based data entry to more automated digital processes. A maintenance engineer who previously may have spent time walking around, taking down the number on a nanometer's gauge, can now spend it being creative and solving problems. But extracting data from machines is only one part of the process. You need human expertise to make sense of it.
Step forward Clarify, a Norwegian software company that believes bridging the gap between data analysts and domain experts on the ground is the way to unlock innovation in the industrial sector. The company's founders set out to create a platform that made industrial data useful for everyone. It needed to be easy to use, collaborative and scalable, and they needed an IT architecture that made that possible with a large volume of data. From the start, that meant building on the cloud.
When Clarify launched in 2018, it started to encounter limitations with its original cloud provider as the volume of time series data being handled grew larger. "We struggled to find an architecture with the right price and performance for our product," explains Tor Eriksen, CTO and Co-founder, Clarify. One major issue was the time it took to load historical time series data. But Clarify's founders also wanted to offer a product that could not only deal with data from tens of thousands of sensors, but could also work with smaller amounts of data. So they turned to Google Cloud.
Simple, scalable solutions to foster innovation
Already in the process of migrating to Kubernetes, Clarify's development team quickly found that Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) offered the best option for a managed Kubernetes cluster. "We're a relatively small team," says Eriksen. "And we'd rather not manage complex bits of infrastructure by ourselves."
Another key decision during the early stage of migration was to work with Devoteam, a Google Cloud Managed Services Partner that helped Clarify design an architecture that would reduce their storage costs and increase performance at the same time. Devoteam's Google Cloud expertise was invaluable in choosing the right solutions for Clarify's use cases, and explaining exactly how the pricing would work.
"We wanted to have the option to scale up and down using the same architecture, so we could work with both big and small companies."
—Tor Eriksen, CTO and Co-founder, ClarifyFaster performance for a better customer experience
Clarify was adamant its platform had to be easy-to-use and collaborative, which meant giving customers the ability to explore and analyze data with the click of a button. "We wanted to have the option to scale up and down using the same architecture, so we could work with both big and small companies," says Eriksen.
What made that possible was BigQuery, Google Cloud's enterprise data warehouse with built-in machine learning. It underpins Clarify's cloud architecture, making it possible to store and process large volumes of time series data in a format that's still easy to query in multiple ways. And because the latency to retrieve results from BigQuery is so low, Clarify's platform can load from it directly when needed, without the need for backups or extra layers of code.
"BigQuery was the underlying technology that allowed us to keep very large volumes of time series data, in a format that it's very easy for us to query in various ways."
—Tor Eriksen, CTO and Co-founder, ClarifyClarify's developers looked into ways of steadying the stream of data being ingested, and eventually chose Pub/Sub to do it for them.
"As developers, it's easy to think that you should build everything yourself," Eriksen explains. "For us, it's really been about focusing on the core bits and being clear about what things we will do, and what we will not do ourselves."
Security was also a big factor. On Google Cloud, Clarify was able to set up its infrastructure in such a way that gave developers the flexibility to work in development environments, while also locking down and protecting customer data.
Freeing up developers' time to be more creative
The result was a secure, reliable architecture that can automatically scale to deal with large and small influxes of data, speeding up their onboarding process. It managed to ingest data for a recent new customer with roughly 250 billion measurements from a fleet of ships, for instance, without any changes to its infrastructure in just a few hours.
Once the data is ingested, query and load times are also much faster. Queries resolve in less than 300ms, and the time a customer has to wait between sending through data and seeing it on a timeline has gone from 3 to 5 minutes to 500ms. This increased performance has been crucial to Clarify's recent growth, which has seen them attract over 200 installations in the industrial sector.
"Collaborating with Google Cloud has helped us build an engaging tool and an operational data platform that combines self-serve simplicity with industrial-grade performance and security at scale," says Tore Norheim Hagtun, CEO and Co-founder, Clarify. This high performance didn't come with a large price tag, either. The average infrastructure cost per customer is approximately 70% lower than with the company's previous cloud provider.
"Collaborating with Google Cloud has helped us build engaging tools and an operational data platform that combines self-serve simplicity with industrial-grade performance and security at scale."
—Tore Norheim Hagtun, CEO and Co-founder, Clarify.ioAnd the benefits don't stop there. For industrial clients, optimizing their operations can lead to less waste, lower fuel consumption, and better utilization of existing machinery. All of this translates into sustainability, as they are able to do the same job, like moving cargo with a ship from A to B, while using less resources.
But the biggest impact of moving to Google Cloud, according to Eriksen, has been being able to reduce developer hours spent on infrastructure by 75%. As a relatively small company, Clarify spends more on developers than anything else. So offloading certain tasks to Google Cloud means they can use their time more efficiently, and productivity goes up. "We're able to iterate faster on our product, because we don't have to think about some thorny issues," says Eriksen. "When our developers are able to use the APIs and the tooling more effectively, we get more chances to try out different things and innovate."
For now, that means offering new features like a dashboard that allows customers to analyze and run calculations based on their data. And as more global challenges make the stakes even higher for its customers, Clarify plans to use AI and machine learning (ML) to demonstrate the efficiencies and competitive advantages made possible when you put data at the heart of the industrial workforce.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Clarify
Clarify is helping make traditional industries more efficient and sustainable by connecting people with data. Since 2012, it has helped industry leaders including Bolaks, Orkel, and JM Hansen get to grips with their data.
About Devoteam
Devoteam G Cloud is a Google Cloud partner for over a decade and a Google Cloud Managed Services Provider. Their team of 500+ Google experts with 8 Google Cloud Specialisations helped hundreds of organisations grow with Google Cloud, and moved over 1 million users to Google Workspace. In 2022 Devoteam was named Google Cloud Reseller Partner of the Year (EMEA) for the third time in a row.