Posted on 10.2.2015

Customer Showcase: Cabforce

This post is part of a series of posts called Customer Showcase. In these posts, we talk about business in the cloud with our customers. While we build our service in close collaboration with our customers, we realise they are the ones that enable us to develop our service. The format is interview based.

For the first Customer Showcase, we interviewed Cabforce – a Finnish technology and services company that is the leading provider of pre-booked, flat-rate taxi booking solutions – on how they use UpCloud in their business and how they see our offering. They are an interesting customer for UpCloud as they have a unified service on six continents (~150 destinations/cities) and can be considered as the industry benchmark that powers millions of business trips each year.

The questions in this post were answered by Cabforce’s CTO, Tomi Kankaanpää. We’ve highlighted some of the interesting parts.

“Our mission is to act as a hub that connects taxi transfer buyers – whether they are travelling for business or pleasure – with the best and most reliable transfer providers, globally.”

Tomi Kankaanpää, CTO, Cabforce Oy


UpCloud: How do you use cloud infrastructure services in running your business?

Tomi: Our service infrastructure is fully cloud-based. We host a wide range of services that allow our users to access our content and use our real-time booking engine. The access is through our API, on top of which we have built our standalone applications (such as our own booking app www.cabforce.com or our mobile app), as well as our integrated solutions such as Amadeus e-Travel Management self-booking tool for corporate customers. At the backend side, we are hosting multiple databases and Java EE-based services that implement the “core” of our service and connect it with our partners’ systems.

In addition to the production environment servers, we host multiple environments for developing, testing, and staging our product releases. These servers are more “dynamic” in nature, meaning that they are provisioned on-demand as a part of our continuous integration activities.

UpCloud: What challenges you had with your previous solution that made you look at UpCloud?

Tomi: The main issues we faced in the past were mainly related to reliability and performance. We had a couple of serious service breaks caused by the infra-level issues plus some general performance issues that made us look Upcloud’s offering.

Our selection criteria was focused on security, scalability and high availability, because at the end, that’s what our customers expect from our services.

Tomi Kankaanpää, CTO, Cabforce Oy


UpCloud: What are your general thoughts on UpCloud?

Tomi: We have been quite happy with UpCloud’s offering. The service seems to be reliable and perform well, and their customer service is responsive. UpCloud management tools and the API also work well with our idea of how to set up and manage services and infrastructure. With a large number of servers the total cost of infrastructure is naturally something to think about, but for us, IaaS partner’s good & reliable base service, combined with capability support our business through their own innovation, is equally important.
Cabforce logo

Janne Ruostemaa

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