The Client

Client is an innovator in the development of vehicle safety products that improve driving performance and lower operating costs for commercial fleets. Client's product captures audio and video data when the vehicle experiences abnormal accelerations such as experienced during a crash or avoidance maneuver. This event data is then reviewed and feedback is given to the driver. The company's product is the only one on the market that records actual driving experiences which are fed back to the drivers to reduce erratic driving behaviors and decrease the frequency and severity of collisions by 30 percent to 50 percent.

The Challenge

Client's success and subsequent rapid growth and adoption by large scale vehicle operators led to a situation where Client's customers simply had too many events to review. Client quickly recognized an opportunity to provide a service where-in events recorded by Client in-vehicle cameras are reviewed by professional event reviewers and objective critiques of driver performance are provided back to subscribing companies. Unfortunately, Client's existing software architecture was unable to either scale or be economically modified to fit this new opportunity. Thus a need was generated to define a new software architecture which would provide for a scalable, fault tolerant backbone upon which large amounts of vehicle event data could be captured, transferred to a centralized review center, reviewed, and returned with an objective critique of driver performance. An added requirement of the architecture would be to analyze trend data in order to perform causal analysis.

The Solution

Client quickly realized that relying on Objectiva's .NET expertise, experience working with defined development processes including Agile, and access to highly trained resources would be a perfect compliment to their strong domain knowledge. Client wanted to take a two-pronged approach consisting of a stop-gap fix to their existing software and a longer term ground-up re-architecture. Client shortly realized that the additional expertise accompanied with the discipline of a defined process allowed them to forego the stop-gap measure and realize the benefits of the re-architecture in a shorter time than anticipated. The solution proposed by Objectiva and developed cooperatively with Client personnel uses an n-tier architecture consisting of a .NET based fat client communicating with cascading ASP.NET Web Services ultimately with clustered SQL Server databases.

Business Value:

• Maximized ROI through the use of lower cost offshore resources.
• Increased quality while reducing response time.
• Leveraged knowledge and skills of in-house team, enabling increased productivity.
• Created a scalable relationship.