Evoca Group
The Evoca Group is a leading multinational company in the out-of-home coffee machine sector. It has developed a range of coffee machines and payment solutions for the hospitality and vending machine markets – including for the Necta, Saeco, Gaggia, Ducale, Wittenborg, Cafection, SGL, Newis and Futurmat brands. With 2000 employees servicing over 10,000 customers, the business is at the forefront of innovations that are powering modern coffee machines.
Challenge
Early in our relationship Mobica was engaged by Evoca to undertake a project with Intel to develop a touchless coffee machine where the customer could select a drink using gestures only.
Mobica had worked on developing this product with Intel, using coffee machines supplied by Evoca. The project saw Mobica integrate an Intel RealSense camera with the machine. The success of this project resulted in the final product being showcased by Brian Krzanich, Intel’s CEO at the time, at the 2015 IDF conference as part of his keynote.
On the back of this Intel project, Evoca set its sights on creating a new generation of vending machines with an enhanced user interface (UI), with larger touchscreens delivering a better user experience.
Evoca had previously been developing vending machines using a system that relied on C++ for its UI. However, it now wanted to use the web technologies preferred by its UI designers. Evoca required specialist resources available in-house to achieve this.
Solution
Following the success of the Intel project, Evoca formed a partnership with Mobica. The initial project would be to design the architecture that would allow the UI to be implemented using HTML5.
A WebSocket proxy using Node.js was also created to enable the UI to talk with the machine management software that was implemented using C++ and Qt framework.
Result
Mobica was able to demonstrate a better way to connect web technologies with backend code written using C++ and Qt. This has enabled Evoca to bring new and different products to market than they otherwise would have been able to.
The ability to address these technical challenges, plus the passion of Mobica’s engineers to share their experience with the Qt framework, proved to be the foundation in developing a strong and successful partnership.
