BOSCH-PT.COM

Bosch Power Tools Drives a Digital
Transformation and Smart Tools
Innovation by Streaming IoT Datawith Confluent Cloud

The Bosch Group is a leading global supplier of technology and services withoperations divided into four business sectors: Mobility Solutions, Industrial
Headquarters
Germany
Industry
Manufacturing
Challenge
Enable a small team of solutionarchitects to power a large-scale digitaltransformation with new applications
that process and respond to real-time
eventsSolution
Use Confluent Cloud Enterprise andApache Kafka® to implement a common,
IoT architecture that supports real-time,
event-based streaming and persistent
event storage.
Results• Low-maintenance, scalable eventstreaming platform established• Cutting-edge position maintainedby small team
• Foundation for digitaltransformation set

Technology, Consumer Goods, and Energy and Building Technology. As aleading IoT company, Bosch offers innovative solutions for smart homes,smart cities, connected mobility, and connected manufacturing. It uses its
expertise in sensor technology, software, and services, as well as its own IoT
cloud, to offer its customers connected, cross-domain solutions from a single
source. The Bosch Group’s strategic objective is to deliver innovations for aconnected life, and aims to improve quality of life worldwide with products
and services that are innovative and spark enthusiasm.
Bosch Power Tools is a division of The Bosch Group. With roughly 20,000
associates in more than 60 countries, Bosch Power Tools is among the world’s
leading providers of power tools, power tool accessories, and measuring
tools. To align with an overall digital transformation initiative at The BoschGroup (called “3S” IoT strategy combining services, sensors, and software),Bosch Power Tools aimed to personalize the user’s experience of its productswith an IoT solution that leveraged sensor data from smart power tools anda newly redesigned mobile app.
To facilitate and accelerate this and future transformations, Bosch Power
Tools (Business Digital Organization (BDO) Digital Offerings) built a common
platform leveraging Bosch IoT Hub, Microsoft Azure, and Confluent CloudEnterprise with Apache Kafka®. As a critical component of the Bosch Power
Tools IoT architecture, Confluent Cloud enables asynchronous communication
between applications and microservices with real-time, event-based
streaming and persistent storage of events. This architecture serves as thecommon ground that ties together a broad range of development projects
and lays the foundation for rapid innovation in the coming months and years.
“Confluent Cloud and Kafka are the heart of all our projects, serving as abackend for new mobile apps and for collecting data from assembly lines
and legacy systems,” says Ralph Debusmann, Solution Architect at BoschPower Tools BDO Digital Offerings. “From the start, we were interested in
not just streaming data once, but also being able to replay it. With Confluent
Cloud and Kafka, we have a single source of truth, where we can keep data

©2020 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io/insurance

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indefinitely. More importantly, we can now build new
applications on top of our event streams -- as often as wewant and as many as we want.”delivering new capabilities and adding value.”
Bosch Power Tools has already deployed several new
applications based on the architecture and more projects

A small team of fewer than a dozen solution architects

are planned or underway. By incorporating capabilities

is responsible for developing the core Bosch Power Tools

from the Confluent KSQL streaming SQL engine, Kafka

IoT architecture and managing its implementation andStreams, and log-based Change-Data-Capture (CDC),operation. The limited size of this team makes it essential

and more, these applications will support real-timefor each architect to focus on meeting business needs

alerting and new real-time dashboards that merge andand developing solutions, instead of maintaining systems.

present data from manufacturing plants, dealers, tool

“Bosch is a large company, but we at BDO Digitalowners, and other sources across the company. BoschOfferings are still a rather small team. With as many

Power Tools has also built a novel software solution for

projects as we have, we don’t have the time to managelean construction site management called RefineMySite

Kafka ourselves,” says Debusmann. “With Confluent

which is completely event-based and which makes use

Cloud we have none of the overhead or worries thatof the latest and greatest features of Confluent Cloud

come with self-managing. We have a guaranteed 99.95%

like Schema Registry. Very soon, Bosch will receive data

uptime SLA, access to 24x7 expert Kafka support, andfrom the tools after they are sold. One source will be theaccess to the latest Kafka developments. By not having torepair service reading out device data and another, moreworry about managing clusters, we can spend more time

important, source will be live field data.

“With Confluent Cloud we have none of the overhead or worries
that come with self-managing. We have a guaranteed 99.95%
uptime SLA, access to 24x7 expert Kafka support, and accessto the latest Kafka developments.”–Ralph Debusmann, Solution Architect at Bosch Power Tools BDO Digital Offerings

Business Results
Low-maintenance, scalable event-streaming platform

infrastructure, behind us,” Debusmann says. “We know

established. “For us, a key advantage of Confluent Cloud

we are getting all the latest developments with Kafka,

is that we don’t have to worry about our Kafka cluster

and that makes it possible for us to stay on the cutting

or any DevOps issues with it,” says Debusmann. “Andedge of state-of-the-art software development, evenlater on, as we add more and more data to it, we canwith our fairly small group.”

rely on Confluent to reconfigure the cluster to meet ourrequirements. We can have data flow in from all ourprojects, and then keep it, share it, and replay it – allwithout worrying about infrastructure.”Foundation for digital transformation set. “Confluent
Cloud is enabling us to realize our vision,” Debusmann says.
“As more projects come in and more topics are sharedacross teams and business units, we will be merging data

Cutting-edge position maintained by small team. “It’sfrom sales and marketing with data from production

a good feeling to have Confluent, the company thatand manufacturing onto a single platform, and opening

has developed most of the code for a key part of ourentirely new opportunities for innovative new products.”©2020 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io/insurance

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Technical Solution
The group of solution architects at Bosch Power Tools

and other equipment anytime and anywhere from theworked on a number of pilot projects with the basewarehouse to the jobsite.

version of Confluent Cloud before adopting Confluent
Cloud Enterprise with 24 x 7 support, unlimited
throughput and retention, and the 99.95% uptime service
level agreement. After these early projects, the group set
up its shared IoT architecture based on Confluent Cloud,Microsoft Azure, and Bosch IoT Hub, a fully managed
cloud service that enables devices to securely connect toIoT applications via a variety of protocols.

Other projects aim to combine assembly line andfield data using the event streaming architecture byincorporating features such as Confluent KSQL andKafka Streams for processing and responding to eventsin real time. Eventually, we aim for a ultra-lightweight“databaseless” and “serverless” architecture for IoT atBosch Power Tools. Throughout the development andoperation of these applications, Bosch Power Tools

The new architecture helped jumpstart the development

has relied upon timely support from Confluent to keepof several new applications, and enabled the team toprojects on track. “Whenever I have an issue, I can call one

outsource development to third-party developmentof the Confluent engineers here in Germany and get anteams while ensuring all the applications would shareanswer,” says Debusmann. “Our development teams havethe same event streaming platform as common ground.

also contacted Confluent for support; their issues wereThe most advanced and most promising of theseresolved and they were happy with the results.”

applications, RefineMySite, provides a digital platform forconstruction site management based on agile principles.
Collaborative planning and consultation, coordination,and communication are all enabled by a cloud solution
powered by real-time event streaming with Confluent
Cloud. For example, plan updates are immediately
published to all participants on the building site using a
combination of Kafka and Server-Side Events.

Debusmann notes that Confluent Cloud has provided
Bosch Power Tools with a competitive advantage andsignificant head-start on other companies in theirmarket. “Many companies are still wrangling with theirdata, moving it into another database or table, and thenwrangling it again. The whole idea of keeping up with datain event streams is so new, that some people have yet tocome to grips with it,” he says. “Kafka has quietly become

A second application, Pro360, implements a modern andan essential part of every modern infrastructure, but notscalable solution for inventory and asset management

all the companies who recognize that have fully thought

and makes heavy use of the latest Kafka features such as

about the value of expert support from the people whoKStreams, KTables and Materialized Views. HGApp uses

are really developing Kafka. Confluent Cloud and Kafka

Confluent Cloud to merge Bosch-branded bulletin boards

are already at the heart of our architecture, and soon I

from the Internet together into a handy app and will serve

expect that realtime event streaming with Kafka will be

as a starting point for further IoT projects. Bluehounda key part of the infrastructure for every company thatenables workers to track, manage, and locate tools

practices modern software development.”

Learn More About Bosch Power Tools
https://www.bosch-pt.com/©2020 Confluent, Inc. | confluent.io/insurance

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