Praveen Viswanath

Co-Founder and Chief Architect, Alpha Ori Technologies, Alpha Ori Technologies

Supernova Award Category: 
ESG & Sustainability
The Organization: 

Alpha Ori Technologies

The Problem: 

To provide intelligent analytics, alerts, and insights to vessel stakeholders both aboard and on shore, Alpha Ori built its platform with an open source Apache Cassandra® database. The wide-column NoSQL system seemed ideal for its distributed reliability and high throughput. Alpha Ori’s IT team, however, faced competing priorities during a period of growth for the company. So when it needed to make some adjustments to its database schema and wanted help with ongoing maintenance of its database environment, the company sought expert assistance.

Alpha Ori initially turned to DataStax for consulting and training to review its schema and make fixes, along with help to migrate its data from open source Cassandra to DataStax Enterprise, a database solution built on Cassandra with enterprise-grade security, monitoring, and support. Considering its existing  stability issues, getting DataStax involved with modifying the schema and moving to DataStax Enterprise was essential to achieving high reliability and performance for storing and retrieving fast-growing volumes of ship data. 

Even then, however, Alpha Ori continued to experience some challenges managing and maintaining the database cluster environment due to its rapid data growth. When it came to creating a new cluster, ensuring the backups were running smoothly, or adjusting needed database scale and capacity, the team was stretched. 

The Solution: 

Foreseeing continued business and data volume expansion, Alpha Ori was drawn to DataStax Astra DB, a fully managed, serverless database offering built on Cassandra that would reduce Alpha Ori’s operational overhead. A multi-cloud, multi-region Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS), Astra DB offers an elastic, pay-as-you-go consumption model that scales up infinitely as needed and down to zero automatically when the database is not in use.

With many demo, staging, and production databases, every time a cluster was set up, it required a couple of hours of effort from the Alpha Ori team. In addition, the operational costs were quite significant, as Cassandra requires a reasonably sized infrastructure to run. Even if the use case was small, it had to be sized quite large due to minimum requirements. Hence Astra DB was attractive as a serverless solution that scales to demand.

The Results: 

Astra DB relieves the Alpha Ori IT team from the complexities of database and infrastructure administration, reducing its total cost of ownership (TCO) while accelerating onboarding for new Alpha Ori customers.

By going serverless with DataStax Astra DB, Alpha Ori reduced the operational costs for its Cassandra database platform by an order of ten. With Astra DB, they are able to get high read and write throughput for large volumes of data, allowing them to rapidly deliver analytics and alerts for predictive maintenance, fuel savings, enhanced asset utilization, and more.

In the past year, the company has doubled the number of vessels using Alpha Ori solutions to save money on fuel, mitigated maintenance-related risks, and reduced carbon emissions. 

For 200 ships on their SMARTship platform in 2021, Alpha Ori calculated $5M in cost savings and 30,000 metric tons of emissions saved on behalf of their customers. 

With a managed Cassandra database environment, the Alpha Ori IT team can intensify its focus on developing and enhancing intuitive applications that increase resource optimization and add value for its expanding roster of maritime clients. 

Metrics: 

Enables reliable and fast collection and analysis of 5,000 data points from each ship every 30 seconds

Unlocks $5M in fuel and maintenance cost savings and helps reduce emissions by 30,000 metric tons for 200 ships annually

For 200 ships on its SMARTship platform in 2021, Alpha Ori calculated $5M in cost savings and 30,000 metric tons of emissions saved on behalf of its customers. 

Helps Alpha Ori double its business with seamless, serverless scalability of Astra DB

The Technology: 

The SMARTship software leverages an (IoT) platform to collect more than 5,000 data points from various navigation, cargo, and engine control systems onboard a vessel. It enables maritime operators to optimize efficiencies and reduce carbon emissions to meet sustainability imperatives while increasing value and growth. 

 

 

Disruptive Factor: 

Enabling $5M in cost savings and helping to reduce emissions by 30,000 metric tons for 200 ships annually, and helping Alpha Ori double its business with seamless, serverless scalability of Astra DB. 

Shining Moment: 

In the past year, the company has doubled the number of vessels using Alpha Ori solutions to save money on fuel, mitigated maintenance-related risks, and reduced carbon emissions.

For 200 ships on the SMARTship platform in 2021, a total of $5M in cost savings (by factor of 10) and 30,000 metric tons of emissions were saved on behalf of Alpha Ori customers. 

About Alpha Ori Technologies

Alpha Ori Technologies™ is transforming the maritime industry from analog systems into smart digital enterprises. Our Digital Solutions harness the power of Data collected through Internet of Things, moving & making it usable via Cloud and applying Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence to it.