EROAD

New Zealand’s EROAD is a great role model of how being quick to react to a fast-changing situation and emerging customer demand can lead to rapid growth and global expansion.

EROAD provides hardware and software that can monitor commercial vehicles and collect road-user charges electronically, replacing paper-based systems. As transport companies seek to keep up with regulatory changes, EROAD is enjoying rapid growth and they are relying on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to make it possible.

“I always want to be going faster.  You have to continuously challenge yourself, your partners and suppliers to be going faster too and make sure you’re meeting that agility required in the marketplace,” said Jarred Clayton, EROAD’s Chief Operating Officer.

Scaling with cloud technology

EROAD had run its IT environment in a colocation data centre in New Zealand, but expansion into other markets such as the US meant the company had to rethink its infrastructure. AWS’s global reach and culture of innovation proved a perfect fit for EROAD and the partnership was forged in 2013.

“As an organisation, we only want the capability in-house that offers differentiating value to our customers.  We rely on AWS to provide those capabilities we don’t have, which allows our customers to be more successful using the service we provide,” said Clayton.

Vehicles on the road using EROAD generate around hundreds of events every second which collate data about vehicle speed, location and condition. That number is growing all the time.

“Being able to test those workloads in production and parallel is pretty attractive and relatively cheap to do with AWS. It’s giving us a lot more confidence around our scalability and as we become a lot more successful we want to make sure we can truly scale to meet that demand.”

Clayton said he can rely on AWS to provide for this boom in data and processing and maintain EROAD’s 99.96 per cent uptime.

“Working with AWS gives us the confidence to go out there and plan that market growth. If you were running your own data centres you would be nervous about the demand that was coming towards you,” he said.

“It’s a level of growth and scale that’s looking very promising and we can go very large and very fast when we need to. The technology is not going to restrict us.”

Having a clear innovation strategy is essential

The company has recently been leveraging Amazon Kinesis to collect and process large streams of data records in real time and provide alerts to drivers

“It’s quite a complicated event processing model that we have been able to simplify using AWS,” said Clayton.

Clayton said EROAD is a disruptor in its sector, and constantly innovating to stay ahead of changing regulations and customer needs. He feels AWS shares a similar ethos.

“We have a partner that is a leader in its field; I feel we are similar in that regard.  Much of the new technology AWS has been delivering is aligned with what we provide our customers.”