iPass
Customer Case Study
Founded in 1996, iPass is the world’s largest wi-fi network serving over 160 network providers, with over 64 million hotspots in airports, hotels, airplanes, and public spaces in more than 140 countries across the globe.
Industry
Vertical Use Case
To provide an optimal user experience across their wi-fi network.
Technical Use Case
• Data Ingest and ETL
• Batch and Streaming
• Machine Learning
• Graph Processing
The Challenges
- On-premises Hadoop system had scalability issues and was complex to maintain.
- Wifi is unpredictable, but expectations are that it should work all the time
- Fast paced, unregulated and ever changing environment
- Unknown number of access points in the world
- Security and performance a highly variable
- Lack of information about where they are located and how secure they are
- Growth is unregulated – anyone can plug in a router and become a wifi provider
- Massive amounts of data to analyze in real time
The Solution
Databricks allows iPass to focus on building scalable business logic, not infrastructure, in order to more effectively monitor the state of the world’s wifi in real-time:
- 21+ billion scans performed in two months
- 100+ million hotspots identified
- 500+ million records analyzed
- Quick iterative development – bi-weekly sprints including QA
- Reduced time to-market from months to only two weeks
- Easier to explore data and assess new ideas
- Opened new revenue opportunities as iPass developed Data and Analytics product called Veri-Fi – $1M new business in 2017
Databricks allows us to quickly process and analyze data, run machine learning, support both batch and streaming, and most importantly, scale on-demand.