PIE Mapping selects Dell Cloud

Mapping, data and routing expert, PIE Mapping is moving its physical servers to a Dell Cloud on Demand platform, which delivers public cloud through trusted cloud partners. This move will improve performance across its business and support the company’s ambitious plans to widen its customer base into new areas of the transport and freight industry. Designed to help customers quickly respond to increasing demands on infrastructure and storage, the Dell Cloud on Demand platform will offer PIE Mapping a scalable and flexible IT infrastructure to underpin future growth plans and will allow the company to reduce the time to generate complex route calculations from nine seconds to two seconds.

Freddie Talberg, CEO, PIE Mapping, explained: “To be able to support a number of organisations at any one time, we need to deliver a fast, responsive service that can provide complex route calculations and offer live updates on information such as road closures and traffic jams. A cloud platform was the obvious solution and the transition to this environment has been made easier working with Dell. The technical advice we’ve received has been excellent and with their on-going support, we’re developing a world-class platform to offer routing and navigation solutions to cities and organisations across the globe.”

PIE Data Exchange, the company’s web based system, provides businesses with up-to-date information on navigation and complex on-street time and day dependent restrictions right across the UK. All of this complex data can be simplified and provided for a navigation-, routing-, or destination-specific need. Having already developed Transport for London’s (TfL) Freight Journey Planner for fleet operators and a VIP Journey Planner system for the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG), the organisation is now looking to offer its bespoke maps & routing solutions to new areas of the market, including cash delivery and construction.

The Dell Cloud on Demand platform enables growing businesses to access secure enterprise-class technology through a public cloud environment without having to invest in building and maintaining a company data centre. As PIE Mapping enters a critical period of growth, Dell Cloud on Demand will allow the company to accommodate unpredictable workloads or data peaks by giving them the opportunity to access compute and storage as and when they need it, with a pay-per-use payment option.

Nick Hyner, Director Cloud Services, EMEA said: “We’re seeing significant demand amongst internet-enabled software businesses like PIE Mapping for a hybrid cloud infrastructure. Not only does this environment allow these businesses to securely host key customers, it also provides them with the ability to ramp their computing capacity on demand. For PIE Mapping that translates to uploading new mapping data to deliver key services to their customers. As PIE Mapping enters a new phase of growth, having an on-demand, always available cloud-based platform at its fingertips will allow it to quickly expand with minimal impact on its existing IT infrastructure.”

Dell’s work with PIE Mapping is a result of a long-standing relationship developed through the Dell Centre for Entrepreneurs initiative. Launched in the UK in November 2011, the programme brings together four key programmes designed to support entrepreneurs as they continue to tackle challenges in setting-up and growing their businesses. As a result of his role on the Dell Entrepreneur Advisory Council, Freddie Talberg had the opportunity to learn more about Dell’s cloud offering and after an initial proof of concept choose to work with the organisation as a result of its proven capabilities and best of breed technology.