Nodeflux: Brings its AI solutions to more customers with Google Cloud

About Nodeflux

Founded in 2016, Nodeflux provides AI solutions to government organizations and businesses in Indonesia. Fueled by market demand, the business has grown to more than 100 employees in three years. Nodeflux provides a platform—available on-premises or as a service via the cloud—that provides intelligent video analytics to customers.

Industries: Technology
Location: Indonesia

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With Google Cloud, Nodeflux has developed a software as a service version of its AI platform, enabling the business to reduce some customer deployment times from one month to one day and significantly lower the cost of customer proofs of concept or evaluations. Google Cloud also helps Nodeflux execute a vision that prioritizes nation-building and promotion as well as growth, customer experience, and profitability.

Google Cloud results

  • Reduces costs of customer proofs of concepts and evaluations by up to 40%
  • Supports business objectives and nation-building vision
  • Enables delivery of a software-as-a-service solution to complement an existing on-premises product

Founded in 2016, Nodeflux provides AI solutions to government organizations and businesses in Indonesia. Fueled by market demand, the business has grown to more than 100 employees in three years. Nodeflux provides a platform—available on-premises or as a service via the cloud—that provides intelligent video analytics to its customers. “We enable our customers to analyze images to recognize faces, license plates, and other relevant features and aspects,” explains Faris Rahman, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder at Nodeflux.

Reduces the time needed to complete some customer deployments from about one month to one day

The business’s technologies have helped power “smart city” programs and Indonesian National Police systems used for national security projects. The Asian Games 2018 and IMF-World Bank Group annual meetings in 2018 also deployed Nodeflux’s facial recognition analytics. The Asian Games 2018 used the Nodeflux solution to secure and surveil an event featuring 11,000 athletes, while the IMF-World Bank Group turned to the same technology to manage meetings that attracted 34,000 finance ministers, central bankers, and other delegates.

Nodeflux also offers a “people counting” analytics tool, a license plate identification tool that can be integrated with a database of registered invitees, and a vehicle counting product. These tools can be deployed individually or in combination to help secure sensitive events.

Nodeflux started operations with a solution that ran primarily in customer on-premises data centers. “We or a customer would procure dedicated servers on which we would install our proprietary AI engine and a solution that met the customer’s specific needs,” says Rahman. “In some cases—where ourselves and a partner or customer could share compute power—we would install our own servers in the partner or customers’ data center. Customers would then access our engine via API.”

Exploring the potential of cloud

“Google Cloud’s pricing and service roadmap best suited our needs, and we decided to deliver our software-as-a-service solution on the platform in March 2019.”

Faris Rahman, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Nodeflux

However, as customer interest continued to grow and use of cloud services surged, Nodeflux began exploring the potential of a cloud-based AI offering. The cloud offered on-demand access to resources and intelligent services and the ability to scale seamlessly and cost-effectively—unlike traditional hardware deployments that typically required significant capital investment.

Nodeflux compared public clouds based on price, depth and range of services, scalability, and its team’s existing knowledge of each offering. “Google Cloud’s pricing and service roadmap best suited our needs, and we decided to deliver our software-as-a-service solution on the platform in March 2019,” says Rahman.

The business’s internal infrastructure team completed the implementation and deployment pipeline without external assistance. “Google Cloud’s intuitive nature, combined with the skills of the Nodeflux team, meant we had no problems delivering the project on time and within budget,” says Rahman.

The Nodeflux Google Cloud architecture comprises compute resources delivered through Compute Engine to run the organization’s proprietary engine; Cloud SQL to run its database; the Cloud DNS domain name service to serve name servers for its website and APIs; Cloud Storage to “cold store” archived data and dataset models; Stackdriver Monitoring to export monitoring to Nodeflux’s proprietary monitoring system; and Stackdriver Logging to export system logs to the business’s proprietary logging system.

Lower costs and faster deployment

Nodeflux has recorded considerable benefits from running a software as a service version of its AI platform on Google Cloud. These include a sizable drop in costs—of up to 40%—for customer proofs of concept or evaluation and a reduction in average deployment times from about one month to one day.

“At Nodeflux, we believe Indonesia’s youth should play a strong role in driving the country forward, and our employees are passionately committed to that end. We are also committed to acting as a role model for the development of technology experts within the country. Our continued success—largely powered by our software-as-a -service solution on Google Cloud—enables us to pursue these objectives effectively.”

Faris Rahman, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Nodeflux

“With Google Cloud, we’ve become much more agile and responsive in deploying our platform to our customers,” says Rahman. “We’ve also aligned ourselves with many customers’ use of cloud services and technologies to compete more effectively in fast-changing markets.”

Google Cloud has also helped Nodeflux execute a vision that prioritizes nation-building and promotion as well as growth, customer experience, and profitability. “At Nodeflux, we believe Indonesia’s youth should play a strong role in driving the country forward, and our employees are passionately committed to that end,” says Rahman. “We are also committed to acting as a role model for the development of technology experts within the country. Our continued success—largely powered by our software-as-a-service solution on Google Cloud—enables us to pursue these objectives effectively.”

“With Google Cloud, we expect to continue to grow and contribute to the development of Indonesia as a global technology player.”

Faris Rahman, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder, Nodeflux

Evaluating further services

Nodeflux is now evaluating a range of Google Cloud services to enhance the functionality of its solutions and efficiency of its operations. These include the AI Hub repository of plug-and-play AI components; GKE On-Prem, a hybrid cloud service that brings the functionality and ease of use of Google Kubernetes Engine to on-premises data centers; and Knative, a Kubernetes-based platform that enables businesses to build, deploy and manage serverless workloads. “We are exploring how AI Hub will align with our use cases, while we’re expecting GKE On-Prem—because it is fully managed by Google—to ease our maintenance processes,” says Rahman. “We also believe Knative will improve the flexibility of our software development."

“With Google Cloud, we expect to continue to grow and contribute to the development of Indonesia as a global technology player,” he concludes.

Nodeflux office

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About Nodeflux

Founded in 2016, Nodeflux provides AI solutions to government organizations and businesses in Indonesia. Fueled by market demand, the business has grown to more than 100 employees in three years. Nodeflux provides a platform—available on-premises or as a service via the cloud—that provides intelligent video analytics to customers.

Industries: Technology
Location: Indonesia