COMBINING HIGH-QUALITY DESIGN AND CONNECTIVITY – INTERVIEW WITH MATTIAS WIDEHEIM, CEO AT FESTINA SWEDEN

Festina Group was established in Spain and today has offices and product houses around the world. In 2019, Festina opened their Swedish company along with the acquisition of the Kronaby brand.

“There were four of us at the beginning, and today, we are a team of 24 people in Malmö. We are responsible for product development of connected watches for Festina Group, from early concepts to launch of the watches and customer care,” shares Mattias.

What makes Festina Group hybrid watches unique is a combination of uncompromised design and the latest technology with the most valuable functions. “The watch industry is transforming. Our customers want more than a nice-looking watch. Their new watch should support them in their daily life with the help of the latest technology.”

Mattias and his team are responsible for the product development of Festina Group hybrid watches. To effectively balance the team and meet the development needs, they were looking for a reliable software development consulting partner. For Festina Sweden, consultants must be a natural part of the team and have the same onboarding process as their employees to ensure a smooth and flexible partnership.

Sigma Technology consultants Alexander Lindgren and Fredrik Andersson support the Festina Sweden team with iOS mobile development and back-end/cloud services, allowing the applications to talk to the servers in the cloud and provide information on the users’ displays such as analytics, available updates, images to display, and others.

“I am a part of Festina’s iOS team in Malmö. Together with the rest of the team, we develop new functionality for the mobile app, such as music controls, taking photos, remembering geo-position, or finding their smartphone. We also cooperate with the Android team to share knowledge and support each other in the mobile development,” shares Alexander.

Fredrik is a part of a back-end team and is responsible for cloud services ensuring that the communication between servers in the cloud and application is smooth and errorless, and all necessary data is gathered and processed in an intelligent way to catch trends: “Right now, we focus primarily on the further development of the system to support coming products and functionality as well as automation of manual processes.”

The COVID-19 outbreak has added challenges to the communication process since all meetings have become remote. Still, both Mattias and Sigma Technology team feel confident and satisfied with the cooperation.

“Sigma Technology consultants that are part of our team are driven and engaged professionals. Our cooperation always feels easy and high quality,” says Mattias.

Technologies used on the project: Swift, Google Cloud Platform, AWS Lambda, BigQuery.

About Sigma Technology

Sigma Technology Group, part of the Sigma Group, is a privately-owned global technology consulting company with operations in Sweden, Hungary, China, Norway, and Ukraine, and global delivery to Europe, the USA, and China. Sigma Technology Group offers cutting-edge expertise in software development, product information, embedded systems design & development, and digital solutions with expert consultants, offshore delivery, and development teams.

For a complete picture, visit sigmatechnology.com

Sigma is owned by Danir AB and has about 3,600 employees and a network of partners in nine countries.