Philips makes lighting interactive using Google Cloud Platform

Royal Philips, a diversified, Netherlands-based technology company that sells products in a range of industries including healthcare, consumer lifestyle and lighting, is bringing the light bulb into the age of real-time data. The company’s ambition was to revolutionize lighting products by letting people control and customize the lighting in their homes via smartphone apps. In order for the new product to work with consumer-grade reliability, the company needed a global, real-time cloud platform to support the interaction.

Next-gen home lighting

Technical advances have dramatically changed how we use lighting — except in our homes. “We’ve got teachers able to set lighting to levels that help improve test scores, and lighting solutions for hospitals designed to help care providers enhance the healing environment in patient rooms, but it has been difficult to translate that cost effectively to the consumer level,” says George Yianni, head of technology for Philips home systems.

As the price of controllable LED lights plummeted, Philips saw a perfect opportunity to bring next-generation lighting technology into the home by using smartphones as the connective device. “We envisioned things like being able to turn on your house lights before you got home, or having a light bulb on your porch turn blue if it is going to rain,” Yianni says.

But first, the company needed a technology platform that consumers could use to securely access, monitor and interact with the new lighting systems.

Massive growth, flawless performance

After looking at all the major cloud vendors, Philips chose Google Cloud Platform as the back end for its Hue line of interactive light bulbs. One of the big reasons for that was GCP’s flexibility. “We had no idea how successful Hue would be, so it needed to scale rapidly without a lot of upfront costs,” Yianni says.

The Philips team also didn’t have the manpower to devote to a lot of IT operational overhead. ”Many of the other solutions would have required us to build a 10-person ops team just to keep the thing running, which would have been a massive burden,” Yianni says. “We chose Google because it let us focus on the lighting and not on management and scaling the platform.”

The Philips Hue online platform uses Compute Engine and App Engine to handle more than 100 million transactions each day. Parts of the system are written in node.js, allowing the company to easily build APIs for fast, scalable applications, an important consideration for Philips Hue, which depends on real-time updates that transport significant data across the network of distributed devices.

Philips Hue proved a massive hit. In the first weekend alone, the company sold the entire volume of stock that was forecast to last two months, and GCP worked flawlessly throughout. “The launch was vastly larger than we expected, but there were no glitches. It was nothing for Cloud Platform to go from 10,000 to 100,000 users,” Yianni says.

The remote control API platform has allowed Philips Hue to scale while providing consistent performance and security. It has also enabled such a wide degree of interoperability and adoption with IoT Smart Home systems that integrating with Hue has become the "hello world" of most platforms.

10x the scale with one-tenth the workforce

Cloud Platform’s lean operations has paid off for Philips with faster time to market and better product pricing to consumers. “We’ve benchmarked against areas of Philips, and we are running a platform with 10 times the scale of other projects with one-tenth of the workforce,” Yianni says. “It enables us to include the interactive components of Philips Hue, like the app and the data processing platform, almost for free.”

As competitors step in with similar products, Yianni says that Philips Hue’s fast time to market was crucial. “Without Google Cloud Platform, we would never have been able to launch so fast,” he says. “We were able to capture users and keep developing new features. That head start was invaluable.”