AWS Case Study: KAIFA Smart Meters

Shenzhen Kaifa Technology (Chengdu) Co., Ltd. (KAIFA), a holding subsidiary of Shenzhen Kaifa Technology Co., Ltd. (stock ticker: 000021). KAIFA is committed to provide customers with the comprehensive solutions and supporting services of Electricity Meter, Water Meter, Gas Meter and Turnkey AMI solutions integrated with big data and IoT technology and has more than 20 years’ experience of independent R&D. KAIFA has delivered more than 38 million smart meters to Europe and over 66 million smart meters to 80 utilities in 33 countries around the world.

The international market has always been the focus of KAIFA’s business. Due to the distinct user environment and needs in Europe, Africa, Asia, and other regions, KAIFA was facing major challenges as it sought overseas expansion.
For one, project delivery date was made highly uncertain by the complexity of the related IT infrastructure projects. “Utilities often build their own local data centers. As a result, we had to constantly talk with the contractors that designed and built those centers to ensure our project could accommodate the operating environment they had chosen and move forward. Adding to this the time needed to purchase and install servers, network devices, and other hardware, you can see why it was difficult to precisely control our delivery date, even when delays would ultimately increase the expenses to our customers,” says Jackie Yan, director and vice president of KAIFA.
Moreover, because those local data centers were built at different times and to different standards, some were not equipped for a high-availability configuration, resulting in all types of failures during daily operation which not only affected the quality of the IDC services but also increased the maintenance workload for KAIFA and its customers. There was another issue that often came up during early-stage communications with customers. Bound by environmental and hardware constraints, KAIFA’s business and pre-sales teams were often hard pressed to swiftly build a full-featured AMI demo that, if it were available, would be much more engaging than static presentations and give KAIFA a leg-up over the competition in a new market.

During overseas expansion, infrastructures and solutions always come with all kinds of use and implementation challenges. Starting from May 2018, KAIFA began to recommend its clients to deploy and use a cloud-based AMI solution. Consequently, a reliable, secure, and stable cloud platform is critical to KAIFA if it is to meet the sector’s stringent engineering requirements. After a thorough evaluation and a multi-stage selection process, KAIFA chose to deploy its AMI solutions on AWS.

By choosing AWS for its one-stop AMI solution for foreign customers, KAIFA is able to overcome various technical challenges and expand globally. This decision has also brought other benefits to KAIFA and its customers.
First, Amazon RDS combined with Amazon ElastiCache offers nearly the same experience as open-source platforms. This allows KAIFA to leverage existing technology and experience to quickly deploy, on the cloud, the same AMI systems originally designed for local data centers, and immediately start to enjoy the efficiency and cost benefits brought by AWS’s scalable services. This switch also saves time and energy for KAIFA’s product team, who no longer needs to wait for months or even years before a new local server room is ready or to pore over the hardware minutiae with customers. Furthermore, because AWS cloud services are free from geographical and spatial constraints, the AWS team can provide after-sales technical support and remote delivery service as usual over the internet even when a black swan event like COVID-19 occurs.
Secondly, unlike other cloud service providers, AWS operates multiple Availability Zones in each of its Regions, giving public utility applications higher reliability and stability than can traditional, self-built server systems. KAIFA’s AMI solutions on AWS, for its outstanding business continuity, have helped improve customer satisfaction; their success has also encouraged other users to choose the cloud as the underlying architecture for the latest AMI projects.
In fact, AWS has become a launch pad for KAIFA’s overseas projects. Relying on AWS’s extensive infrastructure network and consistent service and technology architecture, KAIFA’s one-stop AMI solutions only need to be developed once before being deployed all over the world. As a result, KAIFA can quickly and easily expand to various international markets. “AWS has made early-stage business engagement faster and more efficient,” says Wei Zhao. “Whether in professional exhibitions, marketing events, or one-on-one meetings with customers, we can always rely on the AWS-powered demo environment to showcase our products and technical capabilities to customers in Europe, Southeast Asia, and Africa through an immerse experience. This has helped win us customers and contracts.”
As the next step, KAIFA will seek to further harness AWS Cloud services and practical experiences to develop and deliver products faster and more reliably, and explore innovative applications of cloud-based artificial intelligence, IoT, and big data technologies. KAIFA also plans to join the AWS Partner Network to serve more customers with its smart metering solutions and expand into more international markets.