Transforming cities with smart transportation
Australian real-time traffic information provider Intelematics offers game-changing solutions for traffic and transport professionals, with traffic data covering more than 40,000km of NSW and Victorian roads across the states’ road networks. Its ability to understand and derive insights from historical and real-time traffic trends down to 15-minute increments relies on converting 12 billion rows of traffic data into actionable, up-to-the-minute insights to help improve road safety and planning efficiency. Intelematics needed to be able to synthesize massive amounts of data from various traffic and mobile sources, which was tedious and laborious with the native systems previously used — hampering speed, efficiency and collaboration across its different teams. Intelematics recognized the need to move away from its legacy on-premises infrastructure in order to keep up with increasing customer requests. With Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Intelematics is now able to deliver high-quality traffic data at greater speed to make mobility safer, faster and more sustainable.
Turning billions of traffic data points into valuable insights
In order to produce highly accurate mobility data, Intelematics needed to process 12 billion road traffic data points every 30 seconds, sourced from millions of sensors and IoT devices on commercial and private vehicles that measure real-time traffic volume and cycles. To meet rising customer requests for real-time traffic data and insights, the team planned to move away from their native systems, which impeded the speed and efficiency of the data pipelines they were using to process bulk data in real time, such as traffic patterns, vehicle movements and extensive monitoring data. With the support of Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Intelematics was able to remove the complexity of the siloed data infrastructures and make drastic improvements in its data processing and management capabilities, which also fostered better collaboration and workflows among internal teams.
“The disadvantage of using native systems is the amount of extra work that has to happen. Ingesting or processing data and building insights from it used to be a big discussion involving different stakeholders from the business,” said John Luan, Enterprise Lead – GIS, Intelematics.
Unlocking valuable traffic insights to meet customer needs
With a data footprint of almost 2 trillion data points of traffic intelligence from various data sources, Intelematics turned to Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify its data, analytics and AI workloads. In turn, Intelematics was able to create better workflows and foster greater collaboration across its data teams, allowing it to meet customer demands and uphold its core mission as one of Australia’s leading traffic information providers. As a fully managed platform, Databricks Data Intelligence Platform helped Intelematics overcome complex analytics and ETL processes, which significantly simplified how it handles bulk data and processing, reducing the time needed to understand the whole data architecture and respond to customer needs more efficiently.
Working with a much simpler and accessible lakehouse architecture made it easier for team members to manage the infrastructure, build highly performant data pipelines to process all their data for downstream analytics, and create an environment that affords greater shareability and transparency across teams.
With multiple products under its core business, Intelematics was able to streamline its processes to encourage cross-collaboration with non-technical functions across its departments. With Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, the organization created a centralized space, allowing cross-functional teams to leverage data that was previously locked into its individual and siloed product and work streams. From this, Intelematics was able to customize and deliver traffic data and insights for its customers at a greater speed via its INSIGHT web portal.
Creating safe and efficient roads with data insights
Databricks has made it easier for Intelematics to access huge traffic data sets to unlock traffic insights for its customers. This continuous development supports customers with quality traffic insights so they can make more informed decisions to increase road safety and efficiency. With a simplified and unified lakehouse, standard developmental work that would have originally taken a month to set up with native data pipelines could now be done within one to two weeks with Databricks. The significant amount of time saved has allowed Intelematics to unlock operational efficiencies and new opportunities for its entire data organization, to better collaborate with the rest of the business and drive real-time decisioning to serve its customers quicker.
Embedding trust and collaboration across its data and business teams, Intelematics can now better leverage the data it has across its product teams, generating a world of possibilities for the kinds of products and services it can create to empower mobility.
“Our clients are looking to us to provide insights and create solutions that will solve all kinds of problems. Having the flexibility to leverage the data and capabilities we have sitting in different products is something that can set us apart from other organizations. So I’m excited about what’s possible through the collaboration with Databricks,” said Nerida Power, Director of Marketing at Intelematics.
