Combining the Past and Future of Work? Digital transformation of Zurich Insurance Group’s Quai Zurich Campus.

The heaquarter’s 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.