Vaisala - Innovating at the Forefront of Climate Action

Innovating at the Forefront of Climate Action

Vaisala is a global leader in measurement instruments and intelligence for climate action. They manufacture devices and provide data to improve resource efficiency, drive energy transition, and care for the safety and well-being of people and societies worldwide. 

Vaisala’s instruments and intelligence are used where it matters the most: from the world's largest data centers to leading medical laboratories, from the frozen Arctic to the fierce hearts of hurricanes – and even on the barren surface of Mars.

Cirit has been working with Vaisala for several years as a software consulting partner helping them leverage modern web technologies and AWS.

Using Technology to Adapt to the Climate Change

The world is undoubtedly facing challenges from the changing climate in many ways. As a global leader in measurement instruments and intelligence for climate action, Vaisala is always searching for new ways to both enhance the mitigation of those challenges but also accept that in some cases the changes can already be felt and as such target meaningful information to enable adaptation to these events.

As a result, Vaisala engaged with Cirit to help build a Proof of Concept to enable both mitigation and adaptation of some key climate driven issues. 

The project was designed to bring an active website to life that would allow customer feedback to be generated in a meaningful way with the tangible project outcome as a prompt for deep discovery into the subject matter.

Leveraging Vaisala Xweather Data

Already within Vaisala’s own User Experience team a mock up offering had been created and this had previously been taken to a round of interviews with interested parties. This then led to the definition of the Proof of Concept. 

“Our key challenges were processing data sets of various forms with coordinate-based calculations into such visualized map layers that the end user would intuitively understand as these data sets could not be all stacked on top of each other.”

— Hilkka Heiskari-Tuohiniemi , Portfolio and Program Manager, Vaisala

The brief was to utilize already existing data from the digital and forecasting team of Vaisala, known as Xweather, to create the Proof of Concept. However, there was also a requirement to create new enhanced information from these data inputs which needed careful consideration as to how to approach these novel indices and derived map layers.

Xweather provides precision weather data from an array of endpoints and advanced datasets. This includes real-time weather conditions and historical data as well. 

Implementing a Modern Cloud Application

As this was a Proof of Concept, requirements normally associated with an operational service allowed a certain amount of flexibility but still it was important to do the actual technical implementation in order to be able to go deep enough in the next round of customer interviews and be able to utilize the system in the following pilot phase.  

Cirit had already been working with Vaisala for several years and this project gave them a chance to both leverage their current client understanding and expand the collaboration. Vaisala’s team appreciated Cirit’s flexibility and enthusiasm towards the project and was confident that they could deliver as promised.

“Cirit company founders expressed exceptional interest in our PoC topic and shared the passion for making a true difference for people’s lives.”

— Hilkka Heiskari-Tuohiniemi, Portfolio and Program Manager, Vaisala

Project started with a research phase where the best approach for the technical implementation was explored together with other teams inside Vaisala. As in most software projects, plans for implementation were refined as more information on existing systems and constraints was uncovered.

After some fruitful collaboration sessions with other teams in Vaisala it was decided that in addition to the initial plans for a simple front-end heavy web application, Cirit would also implement the necessary backend architecture to enable storing and processing data in a separate cloud environment. This proved to be the right choice, enabling the team to proceed fast and in rapid iterations due to having full control over the data handling.

Cirit’s team operated in a highly independent manner, communicating directly with relevant Vaisala team members and stakeholders as needed. Main demos were held and the prioritization decisions were made in weekly meetings, which proved to be a great rhythm for this project.

“Great communication during the project with excellent transparency of work items backed up with regular pulse meetings throughout. This generated very quick response times to ideas towards the final outcome demonstrating a truly agile approach.”

— Danny Johns, Head of Climate Resilience, Vaisala

Technical implementation was based on a modern web stack with a React front-end and a serverless AWS cloud backend. Solution architecture was based on robust and scalable AWS services S3, Lambdas and Cloudfront. Creating data pipelines to process and visualize meteorological data required special tools, but Cirit’s team was quick to evaluate the alternatives and test their performance.  

Cloud solution was integrated with Vaisala Xweather’s data sources, thus leveraging their current state-of-art capabilities. In addition to internal data, some external datasets were integrated in order to explore the concept further and to demonstrate the capability to add external data sources to the service itself.

Strong Together - Achieving Results

The project was considered a success and resulted in a fully functional Proof of Concept implementation which provided the basis for getting accurate and actionable customer insights during the next round of interviews. Project also spearheaded and validated a new fast and agile way to create functional Proof of Concept solutions to leverage Vaisala data. 

“Our expectations were exceeded by the team’s flexibility and enthusiasm when starting the project. Furthermore, the pace and quality of the actual implementation were awesome!”

— Hilkka Heiskari-Tuohiniemi, Portfolio and Program Manager, Vaisala

Because of the smooth collaboration between Cirit and Vaisala teams and correct key technology choices, the core features were implemented faster than initially estimated. Thus, the Cirit team was able to exceed expectations and implement additional valuable features in the given budget and timeline.

More client stories