Send in the Fleet

When fleet management company Geotab setup shop in the Middle East this year, it turned to eHosting DataFort for a fully managed hosting service.

Geotab is one of - if not the - biggest fleet asset management companies in the world. Having started in 1996 in South Africa, the company has grown hugely over the past 17 years. It now manages around 400,000 vehicles worldwide, measuring GPS data and trip activity, sending the information back to a server via GPRS, and then providing insight into how fleets can be managed more effectively.

To run such an operation, Geotab needs an extremely competent IT system behind it, as Johan Wolhuter, Regional Manager, Geotab, explains.

"From an IT point of view, that's a lot of data. Our first big customer was UPS in North America, and that fleet has now grown to about 90,000 vehicles, running on a single database. It's all that data coming through. We collect the data via GPS, so we get our positional and speed data via GPS, and then feed that back to our servers via GPRS," he says.

What's more, the service has to be up and running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, so when it came to setting up a Middle Eastern office in Dubai earlier this year, the company had some serious thinking to do about who its providers were going to be.

Geotab's first thought was to link its regional servers to one of its other servers in either North America or South Africa. However, this option was quickly discarded, due to two very important factors.

"We basically wanted to replicate what we've got in North America and what we've got in South Africa. The option was to use their services, which are available over here. But you've got the problem of latency. In our business, we are literally from the road to the map in between 30 and 40 seconds. It's really live data," Wolhuter says.

"When you look at a map, and you want to see where your vehicles are, you actually want to know where they are - not where they've been two minutes ago. With the Americans, we have a latency of about 200 milliseconds back here, and to South Africa it's about 350 milliseconds. That may not seem like a lot, but the refreshes take time."

The other factor came down to the locality of the data. Because many of Geotab's clients are set to be government entities and large, local conglomerates, the company realized that it would need to keep its customers' data in the country, or at least in the region. That effectively ruled out linking back to either of the other global offices.

Quickly, Wolhuter and his team landed on the idea of procuring a fully managed service from a local provider. The provider would host all of the data in a locally based cloud, as well as provide much of the hardware at the other end. This would solve both the issue over latency and the one about keeping all of the data within the region. Eventually, Geotab landed on eHosting DataFort (eHDF) as the perfect fit, according to Wolhuter.

"I looked at offerings from the operators, and they do have offerings but it wasn't the best fit. I came across eHDF and it's almost cookie cutter to what we have in South Africa. There, we use MTN, the big mobile guys in Africa, as both our mobile provider and our hosting provider. And if you look at the two services next to one another, it's almost identical, so it was a good fit. The requirements were easily met. We knew what we wanted from back then, and that was it," he says.

There were a couple of other reasons why the operators missed out on Geotab's business, too, Wolhuter explains.

"The big reason why I went with eHDF was there was a person I could speak to. There was literally somebody whose mobile number I had, that I could call if I had an issue. With the mobile operators, it's this faceless wall - an 800 number that you call, and then you speak to somebody that you've never spoken to before, who doesn't know what's going on, who doesn't know your solution, who doesn't know what you're about. It was just impersonal," he says.

Once GeoTab had settled on eHDF as a provider, the company went about setting up in order to launch in March 2013. The agreement said that eHDF would provide the hardware and the software. However, Geotab could still use its own database, and because eHDF's offering was so similar to MTN's in South Africa, building it up over here was simple enough.

"I think we got a server in 2008 or 2009 with a Microsoft SQL enterprise database sitting behind it. And then we've written our own Web server on top of that. We don't use IIS, we don't use Apache, we don't use anything. We've literally written our own proprietary Web server that sits on top of that. This is great for a number of reasons. We don't have the usual vulnerabilities that the mainstream Web servers have, plus we keep control of our IP," Wolhuter says.

There were a couple of hiccups in the implementation process, but Wolhuter attributes this to "normal implementation stuff". And now that the solution is fully operational, GeoTab's latency issues are almost non-existent.

"Our guys here now get a latency of about five milliseconds from inside the UAE to the server. From outside the UAE, it's a little bit more, but it's not a lot more. And the data is here," Wolhuter says. Geotab's story with eHDF serves as a testament to what can be achieved through fully managed services. Wolhuter says that it's a relief not to have to worry about managing a server himself, as if anything goes wrong, eHDF will have it handled. This, he explains, allows him to do what he needs to - focus on the business.

"Now, all of a sudden, you don't have to worry about it. There's somebody else that's always there, so if something happens to the server, they are there. I don't have to drive from somewhere or send somebody to take care of it. It means we can concentrate on the business," he says.

Source: Computer News Middle East, September 2013