About Vaisala
Vaisala is a global leader in measurement instruments and intelligence for climate action. It manufactures devices and provides data to improve resource efficiency, drive the 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 most: from the world’s largest data centres to leading medical laboratories, from the frozen Arctic to the hearts of hurricanes — and even on the surface of Mars.
Cirit has worked with Vaisala for several years as a software consulting partner, helping them leverage modern web technologies and AWS.
Using technology to adapt to climate change
The world is facing challenges from the changing climate in many ways. As a leader in measurement and intelligence for climate action, Vaisala is always searching for new ways to enhance the mitigation of those challenges — and, where the changes can already be felt, to target meaningful information that enables adaptation to them.
Vaisala engaged Cirit to build a proof of concept for both mitigation and adaptation of some key climate-driven issues. The project was designed to bring an active website to life that would generate customer feedback in a meaningful way, with the tangible outcome as a prompt for deep discovery into the subject matter.
Leveraging Vaisala Xweather data
Vaisala’s own user experience team had already created a mock-up and taken it to a round of interviews with interested parties, which led to the definition of the proof of concept. Hilkka Heiskari-Tuohiniemi, Portfolio and Program Manager:
“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.”
The brief was to use existing data from Vaisala’s digital and forecasting team, Xweather, which provides precision weather data from an array of endpoints and advanced datasets — real-time conditions as well as historical data. There was also a requirement to create new, enhanced information from these inputs, which needed careful thought about how to approach the novel indices and derived map layers.
Implementing a modern cloud application
As this was a proof of concept, the requirements normally associated with an operational service allowed some flexibility. It was still important to do the actual technical implementation, in order to go deep enough in the next round of customer interviews and to use the system in the pilot phase that followed.
Cirit had already worked with Vaisala for several years, and this project was a chance to build on that 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. Heiskari-Tuohiniemi:
“Cirit company founders expressed exceptional interest in our PoC topic and shared the passion for making a true difference for people’s lives.”
The project started with a research phase in which the best approach to the technical implementation was explored together with other teams inside Vaisala. As in most software projects, the plans were refined as more was uncovered about existing systems and constraints. After some fruitful sessions with other Vaisala teams it was decided that, in addition to the initial plan of a simple, front-end-heavy web application, Cirit would also implement the backend architecture to store and process data in a separate cloud environment. This proved to be the right choice: with full control over the data handling, the team could proceed fast and in rapid iterations.
Cirit’s team operated highly independently, communicating directly with the relevant Vaisala team members and stakeholders as needed. The main demos were held and the prioritisation decisions made in weekly meetings, which proved to be a great rhythm for the project. Danny Johns, Head of Climate Resilience:
“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.”
The technical implementation was based on a modern web stack: a React front end and a serverless AWS backend built on S3, Lambda and CloudFront. Creating data pipelines to process and visualise meteorological data required special tools, and Cirit’s team was quick to evaluate the alternatives and test their performance. The cloud solution was integrated with Vaisala Xweather’s data sources, leveraging their state-of-the-art capabilities; some external datasets were integrated as well, to explore the concept further and to demonstrate that external data sources can be added to the service.
Strong together — achieving results
The project was considered a success and resulted in a fully functional proof of concept, which provided the basis for accurate and actionable customer insight in the next round of interviews. It also spearheaded and validated a new, fast and agile way to create functional proof-of-concept solutions on Vaisala data. Heiskari-Tuohiniemi:
“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!”
Thanks to smooth collaboration between the Cirit and Vaisala teams and the right key technology choices, the core features were implemented faster than initially estimated — and the Cirit team was able to implement additional valuable features within the given budget and timeline.