Instant System: Capitalizing on Google Cloud's open cloud to gain a competitive edge
About Instant System
Instant System designs, develops, and markets MaaS solutions that facilitate urban mobility for organizing authorities, transit operators, or companies. Based in the Sophia Antipolis technology park in France, the company has around 100 employees and rolls out its solutions across major cities such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Nice, as well as numerous regions across France and Europe (ex: South, Occitany or Normandy in France, and Tuscany in Italy).
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Contact usInstant System relied on Google Cloud's open cloud and other managed services to accelerate the development of its platform, as well as gain a competitive edge in an already very competitive market with its comprehensive, modular, and particularly powerful solution.
Google Cloud results
- Components that can be easily transferred to other cloud platforms to meet the requirements of certain customers
- Simplified administration and development thanks to managed services
- High-performance real-time processing of large volumes of data
- Cost optimization thanks to a collaboration with Google Cloud experts using a FinOps approach
- Reliable infrastructure
A transport platform making the most of Google Cloud's open cloud
A pioneer and leader in Mobility as a Service (MaaS), Instant System designs B2B and B2G mobility solutions for local and regional administrations and companies. It allows users to choose different mobility solutions for a given route, such as traveling by bus, subway, tram, train, on-demand transport, scooter, bike, carpooling, and so on. On a national scale, the company has more than 100 customers with a total of more than 2.5 million daily users traveling through their platform. The company also has some customers in Canada and Italy. In the beginning, the platform was primarily aimed at managing carpooling. "Our growth took place organically with the gradual addition of new features and new customers, mainly local municipalities and regions," explains Jean-Michel Laurenti, CTO at Instant System. "In 2021, we wanted to take things up a notch by fundraising for the first time. We didn't just want to expand internationally, but also in terms of our offering to companies with a solution that would optimize the sustainable mobility of their employees (https://emy-app.io/)."
Staying competitive in a very competitive industry
Instant System is evolving in an already very competitive market of local communities that want to implement innovative, standardized, and low-cost solutions. Its strength lies in its simultaneously comprehensive and highly modular approach, just as Jean-Michel Laurenti points out. "We cover all aspects of MaaS, but it can happen that a customer uses our route calculator and not our mobile apps, for example. From there, the modular nature of our platform and our connectors—which let us easily interface with third-party systems—offer a clear advantage."
Instant System's high-performance multimodal route calculator also constitutes an undeniable competitive edge. "Our calculator differs from other market solutions thanks to its ability to combine all transit options available to the user, whether these are bikes, scooters, buses, trams, etc., in order to calculate the best route in real time," explains Jean-Michel Laurenti. "Our team of researchers truly excels in this domain, plus we also have the power of Google Cloud's services."
"We cover all aspects of MaaS, but it can happen that a customer uses our route calculator and not our mobile apps, for example. So, the modular nature of our platform and our connectors—which let us easily interface with third-party systems—offer a clear advantage."
—Jean-Michel Laurenti, CTO at Instant SystemGoogle Cloud for performance and independence
Since its creation, Instant System chose to host its marketed Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform on Google Cloud. There were many reasons behind this choice, but the main one was most likely Google's significant involvement in open source software. "Not being restricted by technologies or service providers isn't just a question of perspective for us, it's what gives our solution a competitive edge," explains the company's CTO. "When a customer chooses components from our platform, we're not always the ones operating them. Therefore, they need to easily integrate with third-party solutions, as well as be deployed in any environment. This is why we chose Google Cloud's open cloud and GKE from the very beginning, as this offered the most advanced Kubernetes implementation on the market."
At the same time, Instant System also needed a reliable and powerful data environment. The platform ingests information coming from a multitude of sources on a daily basis, including bus network status updates from local municipalities, the availability of fleets of scooters or bikes from rental companies, and road network updates from ticketing systems. "The topography is pretty static, but we integrate information in real time that can change the situation at any given moment, like a particular bus line suddenly not running. Qualifying and ingesting this data, which often arrives in a mixture of different formats, in real time is a real challenge," Jean-Michel Laurenti points out.
Yet once again, Instant System capitalized on Google Cloud's open source approach by opting for managed services, in particular PostgreSQL and MySQL. The company also sparingly uses Cloud Run, and is considering using even more of the managed services regarding data and machine learning offered by Google Cloud.
"When a customer chooses components from our platform, we're not always the ones operating them. Therefore, they need to easily integrate with third-party solutions, as well as be deployed in any environment. This is why we chose Google Cloud's open cloud and GKE from the very beginning."
—Jean-Michel Laurenti, CTO at Instant SystemA technology partner also focused on business
Ten years after the launch of the first version of its platform, Instant System can congratulate itself on deciding to collaborate with a trusted partner that not only provides the high performance the company needs to keep its customers satisfied, but also the managed services that allow it to focus on its core business. "Despite its significant development, Instant System is still a relatively small business with around a hundred people and a limited DevOps department. At the very beginning, we tried to only rent virtual machines. But we soon realized we were wasting a lot of time on drawn-out tasks that Google Cloud could manage a lot better than we could. Today, we're convinced our infrastructure has to be a commodity that we capitalize on in order to be more responsive and remain competitive," Jean-Michel Laurenti highlights.
Despite this approach now structured around Google's managed services, Instant System has accrued technical debt over its 10 years of operation. What's more, even though it is shared, its platform is embarking upon specific developments to meet the distinct expectations of certain customers. Therefore, the company set itself the objective of moving all the platform's components to multitenancy in order to optimize costs, simplify roll-outs, and stop the maintenance of specific components that are also difficult to develop. It's a long-term endeavor based in part on a FinOps approach carried out in collaboration with Google Cloud consultants. "They've helped us better understand how we're using the cloud, and get a better handle on costs and therefore profitability per customer, which is not always clear in a shared environment," explains Jean-Michel Laurenti. According to Instant System's CTO, Google Cloud's support in choosing the right Engagement Model for resource use (over one or three years with pricing model adjustment) is an additional advantage throughout the company's current transition phase, during which it needs to free up resources to continue to meet its customers' needs, all while developing its platform's components and runtime environments.
"Having a technology partner that is involved in the expansion of our business is extremely valuable. Especially since Google Cloud took the time to listen to and understand our issues, and suggest custom solutions that give us additional leeway to progress to the next phase of our expansion," concludes Jean-Michel Laurenti.
"Having a technology partner that is involved in the expansion of our business is extremely valuable. Especially since Google Cloud took the time to listen to and understand our issues, and suggest custom solutions that give us additional leeway to progress to the next phase of our expansion."
—Jean-Michel Laurenti, CTO at Instant SystemTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Instant System
Instant System designs, develops, and markets MaaS solutions that facilitate urban mobility for organizing authorities, transit operators, or companies. Based in the Sophia Antipolis technology park in France, the company has around 100 employees and rolls out its solutions across major cities such as Paris, Lyon, Marseille, and Nice, as well as numerous regions across France and Europe (ex: South, Occitany or Normandy in France, and Tuscany in Italy).