From vendor exit to owned platform - Optimarin's IoT journey

The challenge

Optimarin is a leading provider of ballast water treatment systems - hardware that ships rely on to manage one of the most tightly regulated environmental processes in maritime operations. Like many industrial companies, they had built their digital customer experience on a third-party IoT platform vendor. When that relationship had to end, they faced a decision with real consequences: find another vendor, or own the platform themselves.

They chose to build. That meant taking on full ownership of a platform for data capture, aggregation, and analysis - collecting real-time information from vessels operating worldwide and making it useful for the people responsible for those systems. The engineering challenge was significant. The regulatory and operational context made the quality bar higher still.

Later, as the business evolved, a second challenge emerged: their customer portal had been built on a no-code platform that was limiting what they could do. The decision to replace it with a custom-built solution brought Devspace back into the same conversation - with the same team already carrying the context.