Traeger Grills
A New Platform for a Classic Appliance
Traeger Grills launched their innovative smart grills based on patented WiFIRE technology in early 2019. These grills have been an amazing commercial success. 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.
Salt Lake City, Utah-based 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 allows customers to see what their grill is doing wirelessly, creating an elevated cooking experience with their customers’ experience at the forefront.
“One of our goals is to bring people together over really good food and to make that process simple so you are building memories,” said Bart Strong, Traeger’s Director of Digital Technologies.
The company actually wants customers to spend less time worried about the food on the grill, and more time enjoying a great life. With an online library of recipes, the brand aims to take the stress out of cooking so you can focus on your family and friends.
In evaluating potential business partners, OST stood out because of its desire to see Traeger succeed and its willingness to serve as a partner throughout the entire process. OST’s expertise, skills and attention to detail separated us from other vendors. In OST, Traeger found a partner who had a vested interest in the businesses’ success.
Migration
At the heart of the Traeger project is the IoT migration, the move to the AWS IoT Platform. OST’s proprietary IP, The IoT Foundation, was a key component in this migration. The IoT Foundation is a layer that sits on top of the AWS IoT Platform, allowing customers to create or migrate their connected products faster. 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.
One of the greatest challenges was the time constraints to move Traeger to the new IoT platform. Using the IoT Foundation, an accelerator, Traeger was able to cut the schedule back six months and lower risk since it is built on stable components. The IoT Foundation is a thin 100 percent customizable layer. Traeger can continue to meet the demands of its large, steadily growing customer base. With our experience, as well as the IoT Foundation, Traeger can evolve their IoT platform for their future product needs.
It's Time to Break Up With Your IoT Platform
Migrate to the AWS IoT Platform today and save up to 30% in consumption costs per device on the AWS platform. To learn more about OST’s migration process, and all of the benefits of the AWS IoT Platform, visit our IoT Migrations page.
Scalability and Growth
In addition to the migration, Traeger gained velocity from running their platform on AWS. They are gaining security and support because the pervasive security model that goes throughout AWS is well-managed and configured. AWS offers scalability and growth potential and the ability to take the information Trager gathers to the next level. Traeger uses that information to continue to improve the process for its customers.
A Little Something Extra: Voice Applications
OST also implemented Google and Alexa voice skills to interact with the grill. The ecosystem provides content including recipes and cook cycles so customers can have a broader cooking experience.
Launching Additional Products: Traeger's Timberline Series
After building an IoT platform that enabled Traeger to grow and scale seamlessly, Traeger engaged OST as a trusted partner to develop their new Timberline Series. The product featured new capabilities that would directly impact end users and the digital experience. More capabilities also increased complexity in areas like messaging structures. As Traeger’s primary AWS platform vendor, OST needed to collaborate with product, mobile, firmware, web and content teams to build advanced features in a highly optimized and “IoT-ready” way.
OST immediately delivered additional business value to Traeger. We provided strategic direction related to firmware over-the-air (OTA) updates and telemetry data ingestion. OST architects hardened the platform via integration and code coverage tests while updating security measures for the platform, firmware and end users. With future maintainability and reduction of technical debt in mind, OST also improved live service monitoring systems and built a user-friendly web portal for engineers and developers to better manage device configuration, firmware updates, users and other tasks.
With this work complete, Traeger launched the new Timberline Series with confidence that their IoT platform could accommodate new users, increased traffic and additional complexity while improving security, reducing uncertainty and saving on cloud costs.
By launching with new features, Traeger has differentiated itself in a highly competitive market. And Traeger continues to innovate and provide outstanding experiences for consumers with the knowledge that their IoT platform can keep up with them every step of the way.
Customer Voice
“We felt like OST was already a part of the team… A huge key to success is finding a partner like OST that believes in you and your product and isn’t just doing it because it’s the job.”
Bart Strong
Director of Digital Technologies, Traeger Grills
Where Do You Begin?
Are you ready to migrate your connected product to a new platform?
Let’s discuss how OST can help in a third of the time so you can realize the value faster.
