Challenge
This technology company primarily focuses on logistics and mobility, turning underutilized urban spaces into additional revenue by connecting people to local goods and services. The key way the company is doing this is by utilizing parking garages. By putting “virtual kitchens,” delivery only kitchens, COVID-19 testing sites, and lockers for grocery delivery within parking lots - this technology company is creating additional revenue streams by transforming its parking garage assets into a vibrant mobility hub.
Data is mission critical to the business, as they utilize their proximity to customers to better meet their needs. On this journey they encountered some challenges that needed to be addressed.
First, legacy systems including AWS Glue were becoming too expensive. Additionally, they came to the realization that Redshift wasn’t going to suffice for the data explosion the company was experiencing. With multiple tens of GB per day of data ingestion, the company started to see the limits of what could be done in Redshift. They needed a true data platform that could handle all the data and grow with them. The platform needed to scale properly as data volume increased 5-10X and needed to be accessible to additional business units across the company.
Lastly, data security, governance, and lineage was of high importance. They needed to comply with GDPR as well as PII regulations, and be able to control who was accessing the data.
Solution
The company replaced their existing cloud data warehouse with CDP Public Cloud because it offered the right combination of multi-function analytics at scale, security, and governance to address the challenges they were facing. Cloudera offers the full suite of integrated tools that they needed, and could provide a core foundational platform that would scale and grow as they did.
Cloudera DataFlow for Data Hub, specifically NiFi and Kafka, is used to ingest and process IoT and streaming data including water levels, electricity, and more from many different devices within the logistics hubs. Apache Ranger helps control who can access the data and provides data governance, security, and lineage so the company meets necessary regulatory requirements.
With this data architecture, all data including transactions from parking lots and cost of goods sold from neighborhood kitchens, can be brought into CDP public cloud.
Results
The company is still early in its journey, but are liking what they see so far. As it continues on this path, the company is looking to continue to reduce costs. Right now they have already achieved lower total costs of ownership for a more robust platform, and they can meet all government regulations including GDPR.
As their digital transformation continues they will continue to monetize their parking structures by utilizing streaming data for complex geospatial analysis and prescriptive analytics, which will help them gain a deeper understanding of their customers to better meet their needs.