Now that smartphones everywhere means digital connectivity anywhere, any physical goods you can hold in your hand can become a rich digital experience. Thinfilm NFC makes the connection seamlessly, with sensor technology printed on smart labels, attached to a variety of packages. Anything that can be labeled can be tracked at any and every step from factory to consumers’ homes— and in real time. Because Thinfilm labels make every unit secure and perfectly unique, it can create a continuous and complete stream of data every time someone chooses to interact with that unique item.

The Challenge

Creating a unified management and analytics cloud for B2B clients in different industries is a challenge, one that relies on a distributed platform with secure multi-tenancy. The data supply chain has to span different protocols, formats, and usage. Data tracking and management needs to reach myriad combinations of supply chain and consumer distribution networks in all geographies. The common pattern is in enabling high-volume physical goods to emit trackable data, aggregated in real-time, to support digital marketing and merchandising use cases. Security and data isolation are core values, as it spans regional and political boundaries – for example, on both sides of the Great Firewall of China.

The Solution

CNECT, ThinFilm’s Globally distributed secure multi-tenant platform,  provides interactive real-time data streams across a rich digital ecosystem. From its roots in process manufacturing, they pivoted from discrete hardware devices into a global data strategy, turning to CloudGeometry to lead the efforts by creating an integrated SaaS platform. Following re-platforming and migration from standalone databases to AWS RDS using Amazon DMS, new core functions of the platform were designed and implemented. This gave CNECT a broad portfolio of configurable services for inventory management and analytics, deployable in various combinations as flexible tenant modules to customize per-client services and interfaces.

CNECT delivers query & data objects with responses rendered in JSON, with granular logging and tagging, writing them to the appropriate database. This allows ThinFilm customers to run BI and other analytics by aggregating event transactions. Many Thinfilm end-customers also need deep customization of tenant-specific services. These range from consumer interactions on tap, custom iOS + Android SDKs to capture data, custom web and mobile interfaces,  per tenant custom analytics to provide a deeper glance into company inventory, and more. AWS Lambda simplified secure customization of the various tenants. For truly global multi-tenancy,  CloudGeometry built both the AWS-based global CNECT platform, as well as a secure replica on Alibaba Cloud for China.

The Benefits

Thanks to a SaaS architecture designed for secure multi-tenancy and granular data management anywhere on the planet, ThinFilm has successfully launched a new market through CNECT smart-label integration platform for CPG.

<div class="case__txt--cols"><div><h4>Acquire/Ingest Any Source Data</h4><p>Mix/match transactional, streaming, batch using Aurora and Redshift, plus Kinesis streaming and routing it selectively to tenant instances via application logic.</p></div><div><h4>Secure End-to-end SaaS Buildout</h4><p>Architect and deploy cloud data pipeline infrastructure designed for ready customization across B2B and B2C applications.</p></div><div><h4>Production monitoring, 24/7/365</h4><p>Mission-critical data continuity operations across business and analytic use cases for platform tenants worldwide.</p></div></div>