Innovela: Building an award-winning solution for surveying, construction, and beyond

About Innovela

Founded in 2016, Innovela harnesses its team's cloud and web expertise to create innovative business solutions for its customers. Passionate about new technologies, it works with both small and large companies to develop collaborative and big data solutions, cloud architectures, and digital applications. It has been a Google partner since its inception.

Industries: Technology
Location: France

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Innovela built a 3D visualization platform for e-Cassini using Google App Engine, Compute Engine, and Cloud Storage to process and store billions of geospatial data files.

Google Cloud results

  • Powers the uploading, processing, and storage of billions of data files, with an infrastructure that's ready to scale
  • Displays complex 3D maps on any device using data streaming with Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage
  • Enables the quick development of a minimum viable product in three months with no investment in infrastructure

100 million data points modeled in 1 hour

When a company needs to develop an application fast, harnessing the right skills and knowledge is essential. French company Innovela was founded in 2016 to provide support and advice for businesses seeking digital tools to give their customers added value. The company has grown over the past four years and now advises a range of clients from the industrial, construction, and automotive sectors.

Building and design platform e-Cassini turned to Innovela for support in developing an innovative, collaborative 3D platform with the potential to transform construction and architectural services. The idea was to create a digital representation of physical public spaces, in order to digitize and speed up processes that previously required manual services. Instead of hiring a surveyor to manually measure distances for each individual project, surveyors, architects, or clients would be able to access measurements and create online design models using a 3D point cloud map of the city or space they were working on.

"Our clients already understand the benefits of moving to the cloud, so our role as a digital solutions provider is to map out their journey as quickly as possible. Using the tools offered by Google Cloud, we're able to answer both their operational and business needs."

Floriane Doukhan, Co-founder, Innovela

To create a collaborative tool that offers to-the-centimeter precision and is easy to use from any device, Innovela looked for a scalable platform that would help it to deliver a fast time to market. Building e-Cassini's visualization tool on Google Cloud was the answer.

"Our clients already understand the benefits of moving to the cloud, so our role as a digital solutions provider is to map out their journey as quickly as possible," says Floriane Doukhan, Co-founder at Innovela. "Using the tools offered by Google Cloud, we're able to answer both their operational and business needs."

Powering the 3D visualization of billions of data points

Delivering a fluid end-user experience isn't always easy when an application handles large amounts of data. In order to process and seamlessly display billions of geospatial data points, Innovela looked for a way to stream data to the end-user via cloud services and speed up delivery. Building the e-Cassini infrastructure on Google Cloud enabled Innovela to solve the data streaming challenge and rapidly develop a minimum viable product.

"Using App Engine and Cloud Storage, we created a secure custom uploading tool for loading data files into the cloud. That was very important, as data was previously loaded from a hard disk, a process that was lengthy and risky."

Floriane Doukhan, Co-founder, Innovela

To create the point cloud maps, Light detection and ranging data is uploaded in the form of .las files, which are then processed into binary files using VMs on Compute Engine. Depending on the density of the point cloud and the number of trees, buildings, and other objects, it takes around one hour to model one kilometer of space. That equates to around 100 million points.

"Using App Engine and Cloud Storage, we created a secure custom uploading tool for loading data files into the cloud," says Floriane. "That was very important, as data was previously loaded from a hard disk, a process that was lengthy, and risky."

Staying flexible, delivering new services

e-Cassini had initially targeted its platform to surveyors, but quickly realized that many more users could benefit from significant time and money savings, including local governments. Once a municipality has mapped a space, the information can be used for many different public space management tasks. The platform's potential applications also extend to telecommunications, utilities networks, and industrial sites.

In order to continue developing solutions for different types of clients, the infrastructure needed to be flexible and agile. "Each of the potential clients has specific needs in relation to their industry," says Floriane. "We're continuously working on adding new functionalities and optimizations to meet these needs. Working with Google Cloud gives us the flexibility we need to develop services, as there's no upfront investment in infrastructure."

"It simply wouldn't have been possible to build this tool using a traditional IT infrastructure: the application development, data storage, and deployment would have been far too expensive. But with Google Cloud, you can pay as you go."

Floriane Doukhan, Co-founder, Innovela

Rapidly launching an award-winning tool

Working with Google Cloud also helped Innovela reduce the product's time to market, even with its unique collaborative functions. "Agility was key for e-Cassini: at the time, there were no similar products on the market," Floriane explains. "Thanks to the way Google Cloud products fit together, the development of the minimum viable product was really fast. Within three months, we had a working application."

The powerful streaming of data from Google Cloud enables users to access e-Cassini's application on any device, from PC to mobile, which is crucial for professions that often work on site. "It simply wouldn't have been possible to build this tool using a traditional IT infrastructure: the application development, data storage, and deployment would have been far too expensive," says Floriane. "But with Google Cloud, you can pay as you go."

In 2019, e-Cassini's platform was awarded an innovation prize by the Consumer Technology Association at CES 2019. "The e-Cassini case is a really great example of how Google Cloud helps us to deliver solutions that really fit our clients' needs," says Floriane. "That's the key to providing an excellent service, for customers and end-users alike."

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

Contact us

About Innovela

Founded in 2016, Innovela harnesses its team's cloud and web expertise to create innovative business solutions for its customers. Passionate about new technologies, it works with both small and large companies to develop collaborative and big data solutions, cloud architectures, and digital applications. It has been a Google partner since its inception.

Industries: Technology
Location: France