Case Study: Philips Lighting scales Philips Hue to 200M daily transactions and accelerates innovation with Google Cloud Platform

Philips Lighting Lighting the way to home transformation

Philips Lighting, the global leader in lighting, developed Philips Hue to transform how people use light at home by connecting bulbs to the internet, enabling app control, routines, and smart-home integrations. To deliver secure, scalable real‑time control and support rapid growth, the company needed a cloud backend that could handle massive transaction volume while freeing engineers to focus on product innovation.

Philips built the Hue backend on Google Cloud Platform (using App Engine, Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage, Datastore, Kubernetes Engine, Compute Engine and Apigee) with help from Q42. The platform now routes 200 million transactions a day (including 25 million remote lighting commands), integrates with devices like Nest, runs at roughly 10× the scale of similar projects with one‑tenth the workforce, and significantly reduced costs while enabling faster feature development.

Philips Lighting

George Yianni

Head of Technology, Home Systems