IBM > Case Studies > Cabify: Scaling Rapid Growth with IBM Cloudant DBaaS Platform

Cabify: Scaling Rapid Growth with IBM Cloudant DBaaS Platform

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Databases

Applicable Industries

Automotive
Telecommunications

Applicable Functions

Maintenance
Product Research & Development

Use Cases

Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Time Sensitive Networking

Services

Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services

About The Customer

Cabify is a tech startup founded in 2011 in Spain. The company offers chauffeured car transport services primarily aimed at business users. Customers can order services online via web or mobile and make payments conveniently through their account or credit card. Cabify has over 100,000 users in Spain and is growing at a rate of 20 percent per month. The company is also expanding rapidly in Latin America. Databases are at the heart of Cabify’s business, storing crucial information on vehicle locations, routes, drivers, pricing, and payments that must be accessible in real time.

The Challenge

Cabify, a Spain-based startup offering chauffeured car transport services, was experiencing rapid data growth as it expanded globally. The company's databases, which stored critical information on vehicle locations, routes, drivers, pricing, and payments, needed to be accessible in real time. Initially, Cabify ran its database services internally using Apache CouchDB. However, as the company grew, managing databases became a time-consuming task that distracted from its core business activities. The company was also grappling with the challenge of balancing the number of servers it could run and the staff time required to maintain them. The increasing difficulty in maintaining in-house databases led Cabify to seek a solution that would reduce operational costs, free up time for core activities, and provide a scalable data services platform to support its ambitious growth plans.

The Solution

Cabify migrated to IBM Cloudant, a fully managed database-as-a-service (DBaaS) platform built for the cloud. This platform provides a completely flexible, zero-schema database that enables companies to accelerate the development of scalable, adaptable applications capable of handling both structured and unstructured data. The Cloudant Dedicated Cluster service provided Cabify with seamless and essentially unlimited scalability. The company could easily add new servers to the cluster as it grew, without having to make any changes to the existing database. The Cloudant architecture also supported Cabify's global expansion ambitions by allowing the company to set up new replica databases in different countries to ensure high performance. Cabify also used Cloudant’s real-time replication capabilities to move data from the production environment to a secondary environment, from where it was exported to a SQL database for analytics.

Operational Impact

The migration to IBM Cloudant has enabled Cabify to focus more on enhancing its core business and less on managing databases. The company now has a robust, flexible, high-performance data layer in the cloud, which allows it to focus on innovation and product development. The Cloudant service has also eliminated the management and maintenance workload of in-house databases, freeing up significant time for more proactive, customer-facing work. Data security, a key imperative for Cabify, is ensured with the IBM Cloudant solution, which provides access control, backups, and data redundancy. Additionally, the 24/7 external support provided by the Cloudant team has been particularly useful as Cabify's business spans multiple time zones.

Quantitative Benefit

Cabify's user base in Spain exceeds 100,000 and is growing by 20% per month.
The company has achieved seamless and essentially unlimited scalability with the Cloudant Dedicated Cluster service.
Cabify has been able to expand its operations from Europe to Latin America, and next on the list is Asia.