MARK MIRCHANDANI: The public sector is full of challenges
when it comes to adopting new technology.
Join us in historic downtown Austin, Texas
as we talk to SADA Systems about these challenges
and how they've built dotMaps.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thanks for joining me, Oleg.
Tell me a little bit more about SADA.
OLEG SHALYGIN: SADA is traditionally
a consulting company that has migrated
users from on-prem solutions to cloud-based platforms
like Cloud Platform.
Through that experience, we've gained all this expertise
in various verticals, specifically
in the public sector space.
That's where my team comes in and helps
enable the public sector leveraging cloud, specifically.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So from a technical perspective,
what makes the public sector different?
OLEG SHALYGIN: So the public sector has unique challenges.
And traditionally, they've been under-served by on-prem,
slow-to-roll-out solutions that really do not scale.
And we see this very frequently in all of the RFPs
and all of the requests for scalability and the ability
to integrate with various services
that they already have today.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So what does that
look like, when they need to come in and bring
a new solution to something they've
been doing for 20 or 30 years?
What are the technical challenges with that?
OLEG SHALYGIN: So the technical challenges
there are very interesting, because they have
a system that they use today.
And they say, look, what you're offering is amazing.
But for the interim, we would like
to continue to use these systems.
And also, we have various departments
within our organization that are not going
to start using your system.
They're going to continue to use the application that they're
familiar with, maybe ArcGIS, Esri, what have you,
or some database solution, maybe an Access database.
They're going to continue to use that solution.
But we want [? Atom ?] or dotMaps
to feed that data in, real time, and integrate seamlessly,
provide rich analytics, and so forth.
So they're not ready to completely abandon the existing
solutions, but they want to migrate
and start using modern technology,
and the cloud specifically.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: But it's also a technology
that's built on top of what they have, not to replace all of it.
OLEG SHALYGIN: Exactly.
So what we have is, we integrate with their existing systems,
and we're pulling data almost real time into the application,
into the cloud, consuming that data,
and essentially making that workflow seamless for them.
So they're using the existing systems
while also leveraging the new technology
that our products offer.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So let's talk a little bit more
about dotMaps, for example.
How is dotMaps built?
OLEG SHALYGIN: Yeah, so the architecture of dot maps
is essentially living on GKE, Google Kubernetes Engine.
And we're using Cloud SQL for the data storage layer.
And essentially, it's broken up into various microservices that
handle very specific needs.
So we have a public portal viewer.
We have a calendar.
We have all of the various integrations
that we have within specific cities.
And all of those are built and isolated
within their own services that can then
scale up and down accordingly.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: And that's one of the nice parts
about having the cloud.
OLEG SHALYGIN: Exactly.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So they are able to use Google Maps
Platform to do the actual interface,
while the work gets done in Kubernetes
and another database.
And that's about it.
OLEG SHALYGIN: Exactly.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: So when considering that architecture,
has that helped people start to adopt?
OLEG SHALYGIN: It has.
So the traditional user that uses
dotMaps from the utility space or the public space--
they're already familiar with Google Maps.
And they want the experience to be very, very similar.
So as with Google Maps, nobody gets trained on Google Maps.
They just log in and, where do I need to go?
Where are my points of interest?
What have you-- that's already there.
And that's the same experience that we're
trying to push to our users.
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Well, thank you so much, Oleg,
for coming in and telling us about how SADA built
these solutions in the cloud.
OLEG SHALYGIN: Thank you.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
MARK MIRCHANDANI: Thanks for watching,
and stay tuned for the next episode,
where we dive into the technical side of [? Atom. ?]