TerraMar chooses Snowflake to boost big data solution

TerraMar, a global provider of asset tracking and fleet management solutions, has chosen Snowflake’s cloud-built data warehouse to support its increasing storage and analysis of global maritime data. Since migrating to Snowflake, TerraMar’s data storage can keep pace with growing datasets, enabling a more comprehensive service for tracking of maritime fleets, understanding traffic flows in and out of ports, and analysing trade patterns.

Wednesday, 29th May 2019 Posted 5 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Founded in 2009, TerraMar offers solutions for improving the safety and efficiency of fleets across the maritime, oil and gas, automotive, humanitarian and government sectors. Specifically for the Maritime market, TerraMar, offers a broad and flexible asset tracking service, based on processing a continuous stream of terrestrial and satellite AIS data from vessels around the world. TerraMar receives a ship’s identification, position and other critical data and makes the global dataset available to customers in convenient formats. This data can be used to assist in vessel tracking, maritime navigation and safety.

Since launching its AIS data service in 2013, the volume of data TerraMar handles has increased from five million messages a day to 20 million – an increase of 300%. To manage these high volumes of data while delivering a responsive service to customers, TerraMar required a data warehouse that would be able to process data in near real-time and make it easily digestible and user-friendly for customers to access. Since migrating to Snowflake’s data warehouse, TerraMar stores close to 15 billion records for retrieval on demand.

Prior to Snowflake, TerraMar was regularly reaching 95 per cent storage capacity, resulting in time spent archiving older data to make space for new data. This in turn lead to longer query times for those customers requiring historical data, as it took employees and data architects longer to provide and supply the data requested.

Gwyn Roberts, Managing Director of TerraMar said, “Thanks to Snowflake we’ve been able to refresh and extend our AIS data service, while reducing the technical management overhead. We’ve removed the time spent on freeing up space for new data and can rely on a scalable solution that accommodates new data growth. On top of this, our engineers no longer need to worry about capacity planning, as we can easily scale up operations in Snowflake and additionally scale down, if required, ensuring a future-proof solution.

Gwyn continued: “The migration to Snowflake has been seamless and Snowflake has made the whole process as simple as possible by having around-the-clock support. Snowflake has also introduced us to its network of partners which has been great for us to ensure we can meet our wider technology requirements.”

Thibaut Ceyrolle, VP of EMEA at Snowflake Inc. said, “We’re thrilled to be supporting TerraMar’s data needs as it approaches its 10-year anniversary. With the high volume of data messages that the company is managing, using Snowflake means it can easily handle current data capacity challenges, while also being equipped for future requirements. Additionally, TerraMar can now build a multi-year historical maritime dataset, helping speed access to insights for its partners and customers, which previously would have been very difficult.”

In the future, TerraMar hopes to capitalise on Snowflake’s data sharing offering in order to streamline certain business applications, helping share data securely internally and externally. It also hopes to utilise machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to clean up data and aid with spotting any anomalies.