Combining the Past and Future of Work? Digital Transformation of Zurich Insurance

Combining the Past and Future of Work? Digital transformation of Zurich Insurance Group’s Quai Zurich Campus.
Together with Akenza, Zurich implemented an ecosystem of sensors, offering state-of-the-art smart building applications in its global headquarter. 

Zürich, ZH: 2108 sensors and 750 Mio data points spread over 43,000 sqm. That is the present-day situation at the Quai Zurich Campus (QZC), the new global headquarter of Zurich in Mythenquai.

The headquarters’ redevelopment brings together heritage properties and state-of-the-art new buildings, which recognizes and continues Zurich’s proud heritage, and at the same time highlights the company’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. Implementing multiple IoT solutions, the QZC is equipped with state-of-the-art smart building technology. The adaptation and digitization can be daunting to many, as the growing options, from hardware producers over to connectivity technologies can be overwhelming and cost countless resources if not planned and executed correctly.

Together with Akenza, Zurich built an ecosystem of sensors and smart solutions, to not only optimize but offer the ideal human-centric building usage experience. Taking the opportunity of the renovation due, the company implemented building monitoring and facility management functionalities. These include for example occupancy tracking, facility monitoring, people flow counting, and critical asset monitoring.

Akenza acts as the unified data layer which enables customers to integrate IoT data into various applications.

This component-based approach allows customers to stay resilient to technological change by choosing or exchanging the data source (e.g. the sensor) and end-application at any time while avoiding technological lock-in. This last element is hardly possible with vertical solutions unlike the horizontal approach of the Akenza platform.

Architecture Overview

While the Akenza platform itself functions as a data normalization, storage and security element, the central layer is used as an interface to all different users and applications.

It is important to acknowledge that a scalable IoT stack was of key importance for this project, offering the future-proof basis to expand. Moreover, the lean architecture is easy to maintain and operate, offering the possibility to quickly adopt changes regarding requirements and boundary conditions while making it easy to replicate to corporate buildings and international locations.

About Akenza: Akenza was born in 2017 to deliver fast, easy and cost-effective IoT for corporates. Akenza is headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland.
We believe that we can have a major societal impact by providing an IoT Platform for enterprises that greatly reduces the effort and complexity that companies have when creating their IoT Solution. By making IoT accessible for organizations of all sizes, Akenza is leading the Internet of things evolution from a prototype stage towards broad market applicability. Our IoT unified smart building layer is used by clients such as ISS Switzerland and Zurich to register different types of devices and to connect various smart building applications. For cases like this, the Akenza platform is running on a private instance within our enterprise clients’ cloud, to give them full control of all the generated data.