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Fastned's Sustainable Transportation Revolution Powered by Databricks Lakehouse
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Transportation
- Utilities
Applicable Functions
- Maintenance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Transportation Simulation
The Challenge
Fastned, a pioneer in the fast-charging infrastructure for electric vehicles (EVs), faced a significant challenge as the EV industry grew exponentially. The company started with a small footprint of charging stations and expanded as the industry took root. However, as the size of Fastned’s data grew exponentially, the company needed to migrate away from its legacy system, Redshift, which was resource intensive to scale and expensive for democratizing insights across its teams. Fastned was also faced with the pressures of building more charging stations and ensuring a continued superior user experience, which became increasingly challenging to deliver with its existing tech stack. The company's data team quickly realized that with an increase in data collection points across its network, the legacy AWS Redshift data warehouse would not be able to meet its growing needs. And while Tableau was being leveraged to deliver insights, wide-scale analytics was hindered by high costs.
About The Customer
Fastned is a forerunner in the technology of fast charging for electric vehicles (EVs). The company started out with a small footprint of charging stations before the industry took root and expanded on a large scale. Over the last few years, its business has been propelled by huge leaps in the EV industry. Fastned has always offered superior customer service across its European charging network. With the data captured by its charging infrastructure, it scaled to support the rising demand and by 2022 grew its network to include more than 225 stations offering over 1,100 chargers throughout the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The Solution
Fastned turned to the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to support the rapid expansion of its charging network. The decision to migrate from Redshift was driven by the ability to easily access various data sources, ingest streaming data generated by its charging stations, and have a unified view of all its data readily available in a single source of truth. With data centralized in the lakehouse, Fastned uses Databricks SQL to democratize insights so that all teams can create their own dashboards and start leveraging data to help move the business forward. The data team is now able to analyze charger utilization data within days. Databricks has democratized the use of data throughout the entire organization, positioning Fastned to be a driving force in the world of electric mobility.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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