Teletrac, a leading GPS fleet tracking and automation provider, currently helps automate more than 200,000 fleet vehicles in 87 countries. The company provides GPS asset location, diagnostics, fuel efficiency, safety, compliance, scorecarding and business intelligence on one web interface -- all of which help their customers increase fleet efficiency and make smarter decisions. Recently, Teletrac’s commercial telematics solution was shortlisted as the Best Telematics Solution for Commercial Vehicles for the third year in a row by Telematics Update, a prestigious association within the fleet tracking industry.

Teletrac’s customers report up to 30% lower fuel usage, 15% less driver overtime, and 12% higher productivity -- pretty impressive! To achieve all of this, the company processes more than 25 million data transactions daily, turning that information into industry-leading ways to slash company costs and promote safety, compliance, and productivity. Each vehicle sends Teletrac real-time location coordinates and engine diagnostic data, so Teletrac experiences daily data spikes caused by factors such as engines overheating on a hot day.

“Where most companies might see a spike in month or quarter, we see daily spikes,” says James Williams, Teletrac CTO, Engineering. “We needed a cloud environment that could handle that load.”

Teletrac initially turned to Joyent for its ability to scale and manage these data spikes. Joyent helps Teletrac differentiate itself from other telematics companies that must limit themselves to a certain number of messages or fault codes. “With Joyent, we don’t have those limits because we can quickly start virtual .net machines to deal with spikes,” James explains.

Joyent offers the best mix between a bullet-proof infrastructure and a development environment. - James Williams, Teletrac CTO, Engineering

Teletrac also benchmarked Joyent against other cloud environments, and Joyent performed between 5 and 10 times faster than the competition. “The number-one thing that sold our engineers on Joyent was the concept of bare metal performance from a virtual machine,” James says. For Teletrac, the faster telematics data gets to decision-makers, the higher its value. James explains, “If one of our customers has a driver who is violating DOT regulations, they need to know that now.” Joyent’s cloud environment is able to keep pace with Teletrac’s requirement for fast data handling.

Ultimately, Teletrac ultimately chose because “Joyent offers the best mix between a bullet-proof infrastructure and a development environment,” according to James. “We were able to reprocess our entire data warehouse in a matter of days. That is something we were not able to do before. The amount of time to procure hardware, rack, and test machines would have been cost prohibitive. Joyent allowed us to save on cost while achieving the level of scalability and fault tolerance we needed.”

As Telematics continues to offer more services, its infrastructure requirements will also expand, and their team sees the Joyent cloud as the best environment for their needs.

“I see no reason why Teletrac can’t track every vehicle on the planet in real-time on Windows,” says James. “It’s important to us to have a framework by which we can grow.”

For a more detailed case study on how Teletrac uses Joyent, check out this case study.