Dexatek Optimizes Its IoT Platform and Boosts Spend on Innovation by 30% with AWS

Dexatek Technology helps consumer electronics companies incorporate smart technology into products like light switches, thermostats, and air-conditioning units. It equips businesses with Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities so that customers can remotely monitor and control their devices, such as adjusting the temperatures of their homes or scheduling when their lights come on. The company is taking advantage of the growing market for smart home products, which is expected to attract $173 billion in consumer spending worldwide by 2025.

To drive growth in this expanding market, Dexatek wanted to optimize its Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure that supported the processing of smart-device data. The infrastructure was based on a combination of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to handle the transfer of information to and from devices via the MQTT protocol.

Dexatek hoped to create a more scalable IoT platform that reduced management time while maintaining a high level of security. Jerry Chen, chief executive officer at Dexatek Technology, explains, “We had to scale our instances manually and schedule regular maintenance to update servers as well as the security certification for our MQTT connections. We wanted to eliminate these administrative activities so we could focus on development and growing the company.”

With optimization as its goal, Dexatek looked at moving from Amazon EC2 to AWS Lambda serverless service. In addition, it began investigating AWS IoT Core to join, manage, and scale its smart device connections without having to think about security. Says Chen, “We decided to engage with AWS Solutions Architects to make sure we proceeded correctly. We wanted them to double-check everything we did to avoid any delays in the optimization process.”

Working closely with AWS, Dexatek successfully migrated to AWS Lambda with AWS IoT Core to securely connect smart devices, and Amazon DynamoDB to easily store and query device data. The strong working relationship with AWS helped the Dexatek team save a lot of work. “We completed development, including all APIs and basic testing, in under three months instead of six to eight months as expected for a project like this.”

With development finished, Dexatek Technology is completing a final technical review before fully adopting the AWS IoT Core–based serverless architecture. Chen expects it to significantly reduce the amount of infrastructure management that IT personnel will need to perform. “We estimate that by moving to AWS IoT Core along with AWS Lambda, we can shift 30 percent more IT resources to product development,” he says.

In addition to being simpler to administer, the platform scales automatically as more IoT connections are added, and data travels between the platform and devices 10 times faster. “With AWS IoT Core, we can drive growth without worrying about platform workloads and offer businesses a level of performance that exceeds many of our competitors,” comments Chen.

Dexatek can also onboard businesses quicker, launching IoT platform demos for new customers in less than a week—a process that could previously take three months. This is because AWS IoT Core makes coding easier and testing periods shorter. Chen explains, “We give the engineers a heads up on what we need them to do, and after three to five days, they’re saying, ‘It’s done.’”

By optimizing its platform with AWS IoT Core and going serverless, Dexatek has tightened the security of device connections through mutual authentication and end-to-end encryption. “I think the overall stability of the platform is also greater,” adds Chen, “which means I can go to bed at night and not think about problems such as a server causing the platform to go down.”