The customer
Speedcast is the world’s most trusted communications and IT services provider, delivering critical communications solutions to the Maritime, Energy, Mining, Media, Telecom, Cruise, NGO, Government, and Enterprise sectors. Speedcast serves more than 3,200 customers in over 140 countries.
As their website states:
At Speedcast, where you go, we go, and we’re ready for wherever you venture next. There's no location too remote, no environment too extreme, no challenge our team can't meet. We're with you every uncharted step of the way.”
The challenge
Speedcast has multiple monitoring systems gathering data from all their global devices on customer vessels and on premise. Until now, the data was all pushed into a single MySQL database, but the team soon faced a challenge with managing over 100GB of traffic each day.
Speedcast used a legacy system to collect the relevant data and display it on the company portal. As Speedcast notied: “This prevented our customers from being able to carry out basic tasks. The result was large numbers of customers calling Customer Care to check and confirm, wasting valuable time and leading to poor levels of customer service.”
Speedcast needed a new way to gather, store, analyze, and display the data in their system to improve the customer experience, make it easier for internal teams to manage it, and gain better insight into the needs of their customers.
[Claranet] brought valuable expertise to the table, and really listened to understand our specific challenges and address needs. Highly recommended.”
The solution
Speedcast infrastructure was primarily on premise. This grassroots project gave them the opportunity to reinvent themselves and move to the cloud and the decision was taken to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
From the outset, Claranet and Speedcast committed to work as one combined team to achieve rapid migration and then build cloud native capability. Speedcast knew that data was the most valuable asset to their business and Claranet had the depth of skills in AWS infrastructure, serverless architectures, and data engineering required for the project.
An early stage was an infrastructure and data discovery phase, which is part of Claranet’s modular Competitive Edge consulting framework. This provided the Speedcast team with a clear view of the data they needed to migrate and manage, and a Proof of Concept (PoC) about what to do next.
The result
Speedcast now has their data solution running on AWS serverless infrastructure that is billed through Claranet. This makes use of Claranet’s CloudHealth FinOps services, plus enterprise level support at the cost of business level support. Being fully managed by Claranet’s AWS engineers, Speedcast now benefits from using a CloudOps service built specifically for cloud-native workloads.
To date, the data has been engineered to be gathered from:
- ServiceNow & Speedcast's Enterprise monitoring platforms, to a tailored combination of AWS services such as:
- Lambda, Kinesis, and Glue (to eventually work its way into Redshift)
- Enterprise solution for reporting
- And Athena for historic data pushed back into an S3 datalake so it is still available but not impacting the portal performance.
The next steps will be scaling this offering out to add in new customer insights, and starting to understand what the next project should be within Speedcast’s large infrastructure.
Speedcast added: “Claranet working in close collaboration with our data engineers was the key to such a successful project. They brought valuable expertise to the table, and really listened to understand our specific challenges and address needs. Highly recommended.”
