Gennion: Gaining insight from location data with Google Cloud Platform

About Gennion

Gennion digitizes physical places to detect, identify, and track people and assets, extracting business value from its omnichannel location-based system technology.

Industries: Technology
Location: Spain

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About Ackstorm

With more than 16 years of experience in system integration and management, Ackstorm is an expert in the design, implementation, and administration of cloud platforms for online business.

With Google Cloud Platform, Gennion built a high-speed, powerful infrastructure that could scale to meet the demands of its customers while keeping costs to a minimum.

Google Cloud Platform Results

  • Cuts support costs compared to its previous infrastructure with flexible pricing
  • Processes, stores, and queries millions of records a day without compromising on performance
  • Deploys new client solutions within a day using Kubernetes and Google Kubernetes Engine

Cut support costs while expanding its customer base

With its omnichannel location-based systems solution, Spanish consultant Gennion helps its clients digitally detect, identify, and track people and assets across physical environments. With customers including shopping malls and hotels, the company’s system combines information from a wide range of devices, generating huge amounts of data every day. Gennion needed to store this data, query it, and provide insight in near real time. To do that, it turned to Google Cloud Platform.

“We needed a platform that could scale to a high degree and support a multi-client, multi-environment infrastructure. With Google Cloud Platform we found a solution that could deliver this while keeping our IT expenses under control.”

Jose Manuel Aroca, Chief Technology Officer, Gennion

“As we grew, we needed a platform that could scale to a high degree and support a multi-client, multi-environment infrastructure,” says Jose Manuel Arocas, Chief Technology Officer at Gennion. “With Google Cloud Platform we found a solution that could deliver this while keeping our IT expenses under control.”

Scalable, flexible infrastructure

Tracking people and assets through large physical locations, such as shopping malls or airports, requires Gennion to take in data from as wide a range of devices as possible including security cards, phones, or even its own custom-built sensors.

When it launched in 2014, Gennion knew that it would need enormous computing power to combine these data streams and analyze them to provide quick, accurate insight. The company needed to replicate its solutions for different clients at a large scale, but on completely separate instances. In addition, as a startup, Gennion needed to keep costs as low as possible even as it was expanding its business and operations.

Early on, Gennion chose Google Cloud Platform for its scalability and flexibility. By 2017, with its customer base growing rapidly, Gennion teamed up with cloud computing specialists Ackstorm to optimize its infrastructure even further. Using Google Kubernetes Engine and Kubernetes, Ackstorm and Gennion designed a scalable, easy-to-replicate infrastructure solution that did not rely on a complex system of virtual instances.

The flexibility offered by Google allowed Gennion to take advantage of third-party tools such as RabbitMQ clusters and Python, to keep its data processing methods intact without re-writing its architecture to accommodate Google proprietary products. “I was very impressed with Google—its facility with clusters. Google Kubernetes Engine makes them very easy to work with. You just create a cluster and start working. It’s very fast and effortless,” says Jose Manuel.

“Thanks to Ackstorm’s help and Google Cloud Platform, we’ve been able to take on ten times the number of customers we had in our first year and still cut our IT support costs.”

Jose Manuel Aroca, Chief Technology Officer, Gennion

Growing bigger, deploying faster

With the technological expertise of Ackstorm as well as the flexible pricing and per-minute billing of Google Cloud Platform, Gennion was able to grow its business, take on new customers, and keep its IT budget under control. Gennion has developed a system that takes in thousands of positions every second, generating millions of records every day without compromising on speed or reliability.

Whenever Gennion takes on a new client, it can take advantage of Kubernetes to rapidly deploy a new, fully equipped container within a day without draining IT resources. Gennion continues to experiment with Google products, such as Google Cloud Spanner for its database management or Google Cloud Dataproc to run Apache Spark clusters. Like Google, Gennion is constantly evolving to find new and better ways of serving its customers.

“Thanks to Ackstorm’s help and Google Cloud Platform, we’ve been able to take on ten times the number of customers we had in our first year and still cut our IT support costs,” says Jose Manuel.

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Gennion

Gennion digitizes physical places to detect, identify, and track people and assets, extracting business value from its omnichannel location-based system technology.

Industries: Technology
Location: Spain

About Ackstorm

With more than 16 years of experience in system integration and management, Ackstorm is an expert in the design, implementation, and administration of cloud platforms for online business.