NTT Docomo: reducing costs and improving development efficiency
About NTT Docomo
NTT DOCOMO, Japan's largest telecommunications company, provides innovative, convenient and secure mobile services that enable customers to realize smarter lives. The company serves over 73 million customers in Japan via advanced wireless networks, including a nationwide LTE network and one of the world's most progressive LTE-Advanced networks.
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Contact usAfter consolidating regional companies, NTT Docomo decided to build and in-house maps and road maps of the highest accuracy—including topography, altitude data and aerial photographs. Since the area covered the whole of Japan, considerable funds had been allocated to the house map data and it took the team two years to build. The volume of data was so large that construction, operation, and updating the data was costly and time consuming.
Google Maps Platform Results
- The team optimized usability of the system
- Google Maps Platform makes their information system even more scalable, with data available across multiple locations
- Map data is always up-to-date and users are able to access the most current information with no additional development costs
- The team completed the development of the Maps-based system within 4 months
90% reduction in map data procurement costs
"The biggest benefit gained by switching to Google Maps, which is familiar to general users, is increased usability. To build a map data system with a huge volume of data would normally take almost six months for the addition of the lowest-level functions alone. Reconstruction from scratch, like this time, takes at least one year. One of the biggest advantages of Google Maps APIs is that the development period was shortened by almost two thirds."
—Yoshiaki Uehara, Section Chief of Network Information Systems, NTT DocomoAfter a disastrous earthquake hit in 2011 the development team scrambled, and management instructed the team to make the system more efficient and to reduce costs. Development started in November, and was completed by the following month. At the beginning of March 2012, four months after the start of development project, the switchover of the entire area information management system to Google Maps Platform was completed, shortening their development period by almost two thirds. NTT Docomo was able to reduce costs needed for map data procurement by at least 90% and improve development efficiency through the introduction of Google Maps Platform. It has been improving their area information system, including the addition of Street View.
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About NTT Docomo
NTT DOCOMO, Japan's largest telecommunications company, provides innovative, convenient and secure mobile services that enable customers to realize smarter lives. The company serves over 73 million customers in Japan via advanced wireless networks, including a nationwide LTE network and one of the world's most progressive LTE-Advanced networks.