Traeger Grills launched its innovative smart grills based on patented WiFIRE technology in early 2019. These grills have been an amazing commercial success, with hundreds of thousands of units sold. This sudden market adoption of their connected grills coupled with a sunsetting of their Xively IoT platform meant Traeger needed to find a partner who would get the job done right, and done fast, with no impact to their growing customer base.
Why Traeger chose AWS
Traeger Grills is the premiere wood-fired grill company delivering a seamless, streamlined way for customers to spend more time with their family and friends and less time hunched over a grill waiting for their food to cook. Traeger’s technology cultivates an elevated cooking experience by allowing users to command their grill from the couch, or on-the-go with the WiFi controller that connects a smartphone to the grill via the Traeger App.
With such a complex tool, channel alignment between technology providers as well as go to market providers was imperative. Amazon sells a lot of Traeger equipment and consumables, so the organic channel alignment made AWS the obvious choice from both a business and technology perspective. Traeger saw AWS as a way to better integrate different parts of their business. Because it’s on AWS’ single, well-integrated platform, Traeger can bring value to the market faster.
If the goal is to sell a lot of devices, that means you’re going to be onboarding a lot of customers. There are two elements to consider. Can your platform scale? If a company’s hosting platform isn’t able to manage a high velocity of data, there will come a day when the platform reaches its max capacity - likely well before a solution is created to manage the surplus data. Additionally, with an OPEX driven platform, like AWS, your costs chase your success. Companies don’t have a heavy investment on infrastructure and capacity before they have the customers to support the investment. As customers come on board, your revenue scaling and costs are chasing the revenue.
Making the switch
In late 2019, Traeger knew they were going to experience significant growth in 2020. They needed a platform like AWS that could scale with that growth as well as one that wouldn’t negatively impact their operational costs. In January 2020, OST migrated hundreds of thousands of grills to the new platform with no disruptions to the end user’s service. By the end of 2020, Traeger expects that number to quadruple. These grills will be online – connected, sending messages and receiving command and control. With the AWS platform, this growth in capacity is available on-demand, allowing Traeger to scale as needed.
Traeger needed the migration to be built and executed so they could move on to an updated digital experience. Time to market was a very important factor. Something that would normally take seven to nine months, OST pulled off in four.
Traeger’s experience working with OST to migrate to AWS
OST came up with a plan to handle tackling this migration in a way that significantly lowered risk and on an expedited schedule. The migration itself has gone quite well without any major incidents. Traeger needed to get the migration done quickly and OST was able to accelerate the migration and do it in a way that significantly managed the risk. Once it was on AWS, the Traeger team had a hard task to relaunch the digital experience with tight deadlines. Because this was on AWS, OST was able to step up to that challenge and leverage the power of the platform to bring Traeger’s digital experience to market under accelerated timelines.
To learn about how you can grow your IoT channel, join us at next year’s IoT Evolution Expo 2021: It’s Time to Grow, taking place in Miami in February. Call for speakers now open.
Edited by
Ken Briodagh
