ServiceStream Testimonial
Service Stream is a publicly listed industrial services organisation employing 4400 people across 51 offices around Australia.
According to chief technology officer Alistair Legge, the company prides itself on its technical capability, providing innovative solutions, including a Web-enabled mobile phone billing system and the Federal Government’s DoNotCall register.
In December 2008 the company won a large contract that involved visiting a million residences and collecting data on mobile devices, including photographs, and transmitting and reporting that data to its client.
“We only had a few weeks to get the solution up and running and were in the middle of a number of other large projects and infrastructure upgrades at the time, including a SAN migration at our data centre,” Legge says.
“Our development partner, base2Services, suggested that the application could be hosted in the cloud and we jumped at the idea, using Amazon’s cloud offering as a platform to host the application and store the data.”
Legge says the cloud model was a great solution due to uncertainty regarding the scope of the data collection and the duration of the service. His company did not have to commit its own infrastructure, and as a standalone project, it did not require integration with any of Service Stream’s other systems.
“We had a good experience with this one and are now looking at how we can apply that to other things,” Legge says. “We are getting close to data centre capacity, so we are looking for alternatives to expanding our data centre, and we see this as one option. We’ll be looking at taking some components out of the data centre and putting them into the cloud to get over that short- to medium-term requirement to spend money on a new data centre.”
base2Services delivered an enterprise grade open source solution on the Amazon cloud to Service Stream that managed field based staff routes and data capture. The solution provided for immediate access via business reporting. This gave Service Stream and its client the capability to manage KPI’s and perform analysis on data that was up to date. This proved to be a major success for Service Stream’s client.
base2Services capabilities with open source and cloud computing significantly reduced the business risk associated with a project of this size in the short timeframe allocated.
Alistair Legge – CTO, Service Stream