Bluefors uses Frends to enhance data transparency, monitoring, and efficiency while keeping integration costs low

Finnish Bluefors is the world leader in manufacturing cryogenic measurement systems, cryocoolers, and other cryogenic product lines for quantum technology, fundamental physics research, and other select industries, such as life sciences and clean energy. The company’s mission is to enable the quantum technology breakthrough, to support scientists and industries to go further, to allow innovations, and to grow and care for their global community.

Since 2008, Bluefors has offered a variety of models of cryogenic measurement systems. These models can be further equipped with a wide range of options, for example, experimental wiring, optical access, and magnet integration. In 2021, Bluefors selected Frends iPaaS as their integration platform to enhance operations and enable future scalability.

Bluefors focuses on pushing the technology boundaries, innovating new products, and developing services to improve customer experience in a rapidly evolving market with changing customer needs.

Erik Holm, Information System Manager at Bluefors, and Timo Koivunen, Head of IT at Bluefors

“In the past years, the market has organically grown, and the demand for our solutions has increased significantly. Hence, we have been able to introduce more products and grow our business”, says Erik Holm, Information System Manager at Bluefors.

The business growth has increased the need for new systems and their integration. Bluefors has started to build a robust IT architecture that allows agile scalability and new business development in the future.

“Our business environment is constantly changing, and it is quite challenging to anticipate our system needs in 2, 5, and 10 years. Instead, we can build a strong data basis that allows us to add new capabilities that help us succeed in the future. We must be prepared for different scenarios, trends, and market changes.”

In 2021, with the expanding IT landscape, there was a clear need for a centralized integration platform. This was where Frends iPaaS came in, offering support to enable the adoption of a more scalable operational model while also enhancing the efficiency and security of existing data.

The cooperation with Frends started by migrating existing Bluefors’ integrations to Frends iPaaS. As a result, data between Bluefors’ central systems, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management, and data warehouse, is now more reliably integrated and monitored.

“Frends supports our processes and reduces manual work significantly. Our needs will develop, but at the moment, the main focus is basic data synchronization to support our evolving IT landscape. In addition, Frends enables more advanced reporting, making the data transparent for different company members.”

One of the benefits of Frends lies in its pricing model that ensures the costs are predictive, even when the number of integrations increases.

“Currently, our data volumes are quite modest, but we have a lot of endpoints. Therefore, the structure of Frends: its agents, license model, and pricing match our needs perfectly. Even when we integrate more systems with Frends, our costs don’t automatically increase, which helps with our budget planning.”

As a part of the growth strategy, Bluefors wants to utilize the expertise of Frends for the maintenance and development of its integration platform.

“At least for now, we have utilized Frends’ resources as much as possible. However, we appreciate the low-code platform that can be maintained in-house in the future. A flexible partnership model with an easy-to-use technology gives us room for strategic change.”

Holm finds the cooperation with Frends smooth and reliable, calling its style “no-nonsense.”

“We enjoy working with Frends’ team: they have a no-nonsense approach to work and never over-complicate matters. Furthermore, the cooperation model and documentation are excellent.”

Holm continues: “We appreciated that Frends has a strong local presence, and they seemed to be on the same wavelength with us. Moreover, their low-code, hybrid integration platform has solid data monitoring capabilities, and the processes are reusable. Finally, we valued the security aspects and the simple user interface.”

The Head of IT at Bluefors, Timo Koivunen, highlights the service customer orientation of Frends, which adapts to customer needs under rapidly changing circumstances.

“Frends has proven to be a genuinely customer-centric partner! Based on over 25 years of working with IT partners, I can say that this is a rare and exceptional attitude.“