GPS FLEET Software: The fleet software and telematics company based in Vöcklabruck (Upper Austria) specializes in B2B fleet management solutions provided as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Large customers such as the Habau Group, one of Austria’s leading construction firms, use the GPS Fleet software to manage its roughly 3,000 vehicles. The industry is characterized by a heterogeneous machine and fleet landscape that ranges from small vibrating plates and mobile rock crushing equipment to recycling machines and road gritting machines for winter. All of these vehicles can be managed digitally with software. As well as localization and navigation, additional processes are now available, including IoT-based optimization, smart energy management as well as – increasingly – preventive maintenance. As many machines and construction vehicles are expensive capital goods, customers want to ensure the longest lifespan possible and the highest level of availability. This is why the digitalization of vehicle fleets is a strong trend.
Fleet and machine management is becoming a competitive issue – especially in the construction industry – and sustainability is one of its key drivers. The adoption of digitalization and predictive maintenance has triggered a massive increase in data volumes, while artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms form the data-hungry foundation of these new services. Against this backdrop, the telematics specialist company Software-Management GmbH, better known as GPS.at, decided to move its GPS FLEET software solution to the AWS cloud. Working together with AllCloud, it completed the migration in just five months. This enabled the firm to develop innovative AI services soon afterwards, such as its Health Index for machines. This is just one example of how small to midsized companies can benefit from a migration to AWS.
The company had actually set up an AWS account in 2017 and was thinking about a future migration, but it was still running its solutions in several on-premises server cabinets by the end of 2021. “At one point we just decided that we wanted to stop buying new servers every year,” notes Markus Häusler, CEO of Software-Management GmbH. “After all, we’re a SaaS company, not a hardware provider.” He adds that running their own datacenter meant they were partially dependent on their own IT experts. As a small company, it wasn’t economically viable to employ a large team of hardware specialists. When operations depend on a handful of staff, outages can quickly become risky in the event of absences due to vacations or illness.
In addition, more and more data was needed for analysis, leading to significant impact on the volume of customers’ data that is processed by the fleet software provider itself. The size of the company’s database was doubling annually with the on-prem solution. That required extensive expansion projects every year that lasted up to two months and involved multiple resources. And along with easier scalability, the firm also wanted to focus on getting new services to market faster.