Battery Management Solutions Technology Provider Cadex Electronics Inc. Finds Extended Life with ThingLogix and AWS

When you make and service batteries for mission-critical applications—from national security to life-saving medical devices—you need to sustain customer and vendor relationships in a dynamic world. For Vancouver-based Cadex Electronics Inc., that started with a 2019 pivot to interconnect its devices through the Amazon Web Services (AWS). Then in 2022, seeking to build an IoT-enabled Battery Rapid-Tester, Cadex leveraged that AWS relationship to partner with ThingLogix, a software development company specializing in IoT. The result: a product on pace to hit the market two months ahead of schedule and 70% under budget—and a Goldilocks collaboration that has the companies eyeing future projects together.

Long before it used AWS to ascend to the cloud, Cadex had established itself as a leader in the battery space, serving clients from diverse industries including the federal government, healthcare, and manufacturing. When Cadex set out to design and build its first cloud-connected IoT device—a battery Rapid-Tester that would help customers test and service their batteries—executives quickly realized they needed help, said Avi Kapri, director of product development and innovation at Cadex.

“We’re changing how the customer interacts with the device,” he said. “There is more than one way to accomplish desired product interface, think of Mac versus Windows. And we’re designing the front end of our product interface to be as user-friendly as possible. If we're not making things simpler for the customer, we're giving them reasons not to adopt our technology.”

Kapri tapped a constellation of vendors but within months realized that Cadex needed only one.

Cadex uses AWS IoT Core and AWS Lambda, among many other services from AWS, to support its move to devices that connect through the cloud. After working with AWS for more than two years, Cadex felt confident that its AWS Account Manager Lisa Kovacs knew the cloud vendor landscape well enough to recommend certified AWS Partners for IoT. Cadex researched the partners and found AWS Partner ThingLogix, a trusted, experienced player in the field.

It was soon clear that ThingLogix’s approach to cloud-based product development would help speed time-to-market and ensure scalability for Cadex, which serves clients in more than 100 countries. “Time to market is very important to us,” Kapri said.

He added that he was impressed with ThingLogix’s solid technological expertise, from front to back-end innovation. “ThingLogix asked all the right questions” to guide Cadex through the IoT product development process, Kapri recalled. “Do we want that functionality here? Do we have to build a certain page into the application? Are we looking at it from the customer’s standpoint?"

Challenges are magnified with new technology and architecture. The teams had to decide how the product would reside on AWS, how it would be updated over the years, how to set up and fulfill subscriptions, and more. As Kapri said, “There’s tons of work in the background to enable that tech so that from the point of view of our customers, it just works.”

Jason Burch, vice president of partnerships and growth at ThingLogix, called the Cadex partnership “a natural fit” because it plays to ThingLogix’s strengths: finding cost and time savings in a product development plan.

Those capabilities quickly came into play at the companies’ first meeting in June 2022 when Cadex asked ThingLogix to have a proof-of-concept done by fall, and a production roll-out by the end of 2022. Once the ThingLogix partnership was sealed, the two companies met every deliverable for the proof-of-concept within a tight, two-month timeframe.

A key factor driving the success is ThingLogix Foundry—an open-source application-building framework—which saves time and money in development. So instead of paying to have all its code rewritten from scratch to enable IoT and cloud connectivity, Cadex was able to take advantage of existing tools, which has yielded cost savings of 70%.

Both executives also noted the compatibility between their teams. “Culturally, we love Cadex,” Burch said. “We work as one team.”

Kapri and Burch expressed excitement about continuing the partnership. “I can say with confidence that the moment we hit December we'll start looking at the next collaboration,” Kapri said.