Nivy Watch gains unmatched scale and simplicity with Azure Cosmos DB

Nivy Watch is a leading maker of smartwatches designed for professional use. Originally used primarily as personal fitness trackers, smartwatches are quickly gaining a foothold in the business world by offering crucial insight into employee and process efficiency. Using specialized sensors, antennas, and software, Nivy watches can calculate how long it takes an employee to perform a task, along with the distance they traveled—allowing businesses to make on-the-fly adjustments that streamline workflows. When Nivy Watch’s existing database struggled to keep up with increasing demands, it turned to Microsoft Azure Cosmos DB to gain the speed, scale, and simplicity the 10-person team needed to win customers and drive growth.

The proof is in the process

For manufacturing, warehouse, and production-based businesses, labor costs are a huge expense, and inefficiencies in workflows, assembly lines, and processes can have a compounding effect on the cost of operations.

Enter Nivy Watch. The Bratislava, Slovakia–based company makes smartwatches designed to improve process efficiency by helping businesses draw insights from data. For example, consider a worker packaging books in a warehouse. They collect the book at point A, box it up at point B, and ship it at point C, traveling roughly 30 feet between stations. As they walk along this route, Nivy Watch is busy collecting tons of valuable information: path between points, time spent at each station, route speed, etc. The business can then look at this data and conclude that, by spacing stations closer together, they can pack more books and offset the cost of labor.

Struggling to keep up

Nivy watches produce a staggering amount of data. A single watch produces roughly 10,000 records per day. Multiply that by a hundred watches, and that’s 30,000,000 records per month and 360,000,000 per year—all from a smaller-scale deployment. “Our database was huge. We get millions and millions of data records per month, multiplied by one or two years—that’s just massive. And all that data needs to be analyzed,” says Dale Kirkwood, Business Development Manager at Nivy Watch.

As a relatively new company, Nivy Watch has ambitious plans for growth over the next few years. But it had a problem: its existing MySQL database was already struggling to handle the massive amounts of information streaming in daily. To hit its aggressive growth targets, Nivy needed a scalable database that could handle the scope and scale of incoming data.

A database built for growth

Nivy Watch considered a few database solutions before settling on the only option offering the simplicity and scale it needed: Azure Cosmos DB. According to Kirkwood, “Frankly, Azure Cosmos DB is made for exactly this level of data. We couldn’t have found a better database.”

Watch settings—like sync times, clock face, screen timeouts, etc.—are initially stored in a SQL database and interpreted using Azure IoT Hub. From there, telemetry data like heart rate, distance traveled, distance between beacons, step count, and accelerometer information flows into Azure Cosmos DB for analyzing and then onto Microsoft Power BI for data manipulation and visualization. Workloads of any size are guaranteed automatic availability, a huge benefit for companies that need to manage unexpected data surges.

Developers at Nivy Watch were also drawn to global geo-replication abilities in Azure Cosmos DB—a critical advantage to winning new customers. “A lot of our customers want their data stored nearby for security reasons. With Azure Cosmos DB, we can geo-replicate wherever they are. So, they know—and we know—that everything’s taken care of,” elaborates Kirkwood. The low latency and high availability of Azure Cosmos DB help ensure that Nivy Watch customers have fast access to data whenever they need it, wherever they are in the world.

“We want to grow—and we want to grow fast. We can do that with Azure Cosmos DB. We’re very confident as a company that this is the right back end for us.”

Dale Kirkwood, Business Development Manager, Nivy Watch

“Nothing’s a problem”

Scale wasn’t the only selling point for Nivy Watch—simplicity and ease-of-use were also major benefits. “I work on the business side, but the thing I’ve heard over and over again from our developers is that it’s so unbelievably simple to use. With Azure Cosmos DB, nothing’s a problem,” says Kirkwood.

Part of that simplicity is that, as a non-relational database, Azure Cosmos DB stores data in document form, which offers schema flexibility that you can’t get when working in a relational database. For Nivy Watch’s vast and varied data sets, this is ideal. It can simply load its complex, unstructured data records into Azure Cosmos DB, regardless of format. From there, it’s automatically ready to be processed and analyzed. These data sets can then be quickly queried with ease, as Azure Cosmos DB doesn’t have to view multiple tables to deliver answers. For Nivy, that means it can query data and represent it in easily digestible, personalized ways for the customer using Power BI. So, if a customer wants to look into something like watch battery life, Nivy can easily query that data and automatically display it in Power BI graphs and charts on the front end. And the data is always 100 percent up to date.

“With Azure Comsos DB, we don’t have to worry about the database side of the business. It’s like, ‘tick, that’s done!’ We can just focus on growth.”

Dale Kirkwood, Business Development Manager, Nivy Watch

A bright future

Armed with newfound speed, scale, and simplicity, Nivy Watch looks forward to hitting its ambitious growth targets with the help of Azure Cosmos DB. “We’re a very fresh, very new company to this market. We’re going to be growing exponentially over the next few years, and Azure Cosmos DB is giving us the confidence to talk to new customers knowing we have this excellent database. It’s a very important thing for a small company,” says Kirkwood.