Kachelmann Finds Trusted Partner in Akamai

Founded in 2014, Kachelmann GmbH offers state-of-the-art weather services drawing on decades of know-how. Its group of international weather forecasting companies includes meteologix.com, weather.us, weathermodels.com and kachelmannwetter.com. The company mainly focuses on providing sophisticated, state-of-the-art B2B weather forecasting solutions for customers that rely on accurate weather data. In recent years, Kachelmann has developed tools for storm tracking, flash flood warning, hail alarms, rotation tracking, and its own high-resolution 1x1 km weather model. When its previous CDN provider stopped serving the company’s needs, Kachelmann turned to Akamai. 

Citizens and businesses in industries including energy, insurance, agriculture, government, and transport and logistics rely on up-to-date weather broadcasts from Kachelmann to minimize damage, and in extreme cases, to save lives. Providing a highly valuable and necessary service, Kachelmann must ensure its web portals seamlessly handle traffic surges and successfully fend off attacks. 

To that end, the company contracted with a CDN provider to deliver its sites. While the provider satisfied Kachelmann’s needs for a while, the relationship turned problematic. The vendor started implementing nontransparent price jumps and contract renewals. It suggested features that didn’t meet Kachelmann’s needs, and even added features without informing the customer. “When we are spending too much time thinking about and dealing with a vendor, it’s not good,” explains Miriam Kachelmann, the company’s Chief Operating Officer.

In addition, Kachelmann was continually dealing with different points of contact, causing frustration as it had to re-explain its IT environment and needs. The core of Kachelmann’s weather portals are charts and maps for every part of the world. Site visitors can select different parameters — such as temperature and precipitation — to generate these images on the fly. As Kachelmann says, “When thousands of people access our site simultaneously, it creates lots of load on our servers to process their requests.”

After researching its options, the weather forecasting company chose Akamai. According to Kachelmann, “We are a smaller company but technically sophisticated, and not all vendors could fulfill our technical requirements. Akamai provided an outstanding sales experience and the services we needed: Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator, Global Traffic Management, and Edge DNS.” 

Kachelmann continues, “In Switzerland, trust is important, and we felt mutual trust with Akamai from the start.”

To avoid a long-term contract renewal with its existing CDN provider, Kachelmann had to migrate its domains quickly to the Akamai services. Akamai and its partner Swisscom made the process easy, helping the company migrate in less than two weeks.

Kachelmann is impressed with how granularly it can configure Akamai services. “Our previous CDN vendor just allowed us to toggle services off or on. With Akamai, we can get incredibly detailed to address our needs,” explains Kachelmann. In fact, Akamai shields the company from the DDoS attacks that previously damaged the business.

At the same time, Akamai reroutes traffic and blocks the extra requests that stressed Kachelmann’s servers. “Akamai dramatically reduces our server load, even under large traffic surges.”

For instance, Akamai seamlessly handled 1.3 million visitors and 11 million visits during a severe weather event — even as official government weather pages were down. “Without Akamai, that traffic surge would have been a big problem for us. And our server costs would be 10 times higher,” she continues.

Kachelmann is also pleased with the level of personal, consistent support it experiences with Akamai. “Our dedicated points of contact are familiar with our business and IT environment, so we don’t have to explain those repeatedly. That is critical as we grow our business and need to move quickly,” Kachelmann underscores. 

Going forward, the weather forecasting company plans to expand its partnership with Akamai. For example, it will take advantage of Akamai App & API Protector to secure a soon-to-be-released API service for consumers. Moreover, it is interested in GPU cloud options from Akamai. 

“It would be attractive to access an on-demand GPU cloud to showcase our weather model and radar forecast to potential customers, as it can cost us $1,500 to run just one server. These are just two of the ways we envision working with Akamai in the future as we expand our business,” she concludes.

The Kachelmann Group is a group of international operating weather forecasting companies around their experienced founder — meteorologist, entrepreneur, and presenter Joerg Kachelmann. The group runs the successful international weather portals meteologix.com, weather.us, weathermodels.com, and kachelmannwetter.com, but is mainly focused on sophisticated, state-ofthe-art B2B weather forecasting solutions for industry customers that rely on accurate weather data.

The Kachelmann Group has outlets around the world and services international companies of all kinds of backgrounds, including energy providers, insurance, agriculture, government agencies, and transport and logistics businesses.

https://business.kachelmannwetter.com

As Switzerland’s number one firm for communications, IT, and entertainment, Swisscom is shaping the future as one of the most innovative and sustainable companies in Switzerland. In total, more than 19,000 employees work for Swisscom. The Swisscom subsidiary Fastweb is also active in Italy.

https://swisscom.ch