How Springworks got cars talking with SPARK and created an app that’s become a standard on Swedish phones

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At a glance

– Springworks’ SPARK is an IoT platform that collects data from millions of cars, and connects their drivers with a network of services.

– It’s instant value for drivers and an attractive new business model for mobile operators and car service providers.

– For Springworks to land and expand with their new model, they had to get three things right: speed to market,

How do you turn billions of customer data points into a successful new business model? And can you do it faster than the competition, fully compliant, and at infinite scale?

the ability to scale seamlessly, and guaranteed data security.

– With AWS, Springworks were able to innovate, as well as scale-up and secure their infrastructure in just a few months.

– Swedish mobile giant Telia Company are deploying SPARK on all of their markets in Nordics and Baltics and other European mobile operators are following suit.

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The road ahead

It’s January. First payday since moving house. You’re planning finances for this month. You check your banking app for January payments. After playing with the numbers you get a pleasant surprise – there’s money left over!

Sorted. Time to book that weekend away. A few clicks – tickets confirmed. Amazing.

You get in your car. Wait a minute. Isn’t your MOT due in January? Oh God. And doesn’t your car insurance renew now? It does. Bye-bye nest egg.

What do you do now? Where do you even get an MOT in this town?

This isn’t good enough.

What if your car could talk to you? What if it could warn you about service deadlines ahead of time? What if it could direct you to the nearest service provider?

SPARK is a cloud-based car-connecting platform by Springworks that lets vehicles communicate with drivers on demand. Between weather, banking, and traffic alerts, drivers are kept informed on everything from servicing deadlines and recommendations to safety alerts and diagnostics, so they never get nasty surprises – they’re always sorted.

This is the story of how SPARK went from a great idea to a successful business model.

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20 million talking cars in Europe by 2020.

220 million talking cars in Europe by

2The vision

Old school vehicle diagnostics and service communications weren’t up to scratch – and Springworks knew it. They’d also come to a realization: people who own cars ought to benefit from the data generated by them.

So they launched SPARK – a platform that lets car owners receive key data about their vehicles at the touch of a button, served straight from the cloud, direct to their smartphones. And it connects them with service providers that can sort any issues that might come up – from MOTs to tyre changes.

Springworks also had an ambition – 20 million talking cars in Europe by 2020.

But to achieve it, they had to tackle a few problems.

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Each talking car generates about 10,000 data points per day. To handle 20 million cars, Springworks needed a system that could handle several billion data points in one go. As a company with a background in gaming, they’d been through the ins and outs of on-premise (like colocation services and physical racks.) That wasn’t good enough. They wanted limitless scale.

And in order to hit the market with a great new product, Springworks needed to be able to focus on innovation. When they started out, the release cycle as about 2 weeks for a new feature – but the team wanted to move faster.

Finally, data security: for a new market offer that was looking to partner with the big mobile networks, security couldn’t be an afterthought. It had to be built into the SPARK infrastructure from the start.

Fuel consumption

Tyre change notification

Work trips Nearby petrol stations

Total mileage

Battery wear

Oil-o-meter

Service statusParking warning

Facing the challenge

10,000 data points per day 20 million carsSeveral billion data points

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Getting the spark back

Determined to follow vision, Springworks turned to AWS.

They used Elastic Load Balancing and Autoscaling to manage their powerful APIs – suddenly, it didn’t matter whether they had a hundred or a million cars talking at once, they could “scale without limits,” in the words of Springworks CTO Kristofer Sommestad.

And the workload dropped instantly – today, the entire platform can be operated by a team of 30 instead of 3,000, which “eliminates the need for an operations department,” according to Sommestad.

Then they used Lambda and SNS to automate responses to events. “Because we didn’t have to run code manually anymore, we were able to focus on innovation – and accelerate releases by

something like 300%”, says Sommestad. Instead of one feature every two weeks, they’re now shipping two features weekly.

Finally they used services like CloudTrail and EC2 to build a secure, compliance-friendly infrastructure – had they not turned to AWS, they’d still be building two years from now.

Success Stats:

Before After

Team

30

Speed

0.5 2new features per week

new features per week

Secure infrastructure

2 2years to build months to build

90

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Next stop: analytics

SPARK began to attract partners, and teams of car service providers wanting to promote their products via the platform.

A few months later, with confident backing, SPARK went off without a hitch. Now, mobile operators like Telia are integrating the SPARK app as a standard, and Springworks are preparing for the rest of Europe to follow suit.

The next step for Springworks is how it can use all that data. Sommestad concludes, “We want to understand what we could do better. How can we make car ownership even easier. I’m confident that AWS has the tools to help us with this too and we’re looking forward exploring data analysis with services like Amazon Redshift and Amazon Kinesis to make our service even more useful for car owners.”

Scale Auto Scaling across Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

Elastic Load Balancing

OperationsAWS CloudFormation

Automation + Speed to marketAWS Lambda

NotificationsAmazon Simple Notification Service

Amazon Simple Queue Service

SecurityAWS Identity and Access Management

AWS CloudTrail

Amazon EC2 security groups

SupportAWS Business Support

AWS helped with:

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If you’ve got a vision for your business, we want to follow it with you. Find out how to get started on AWS. Or learn how AWS can help you to develop applications that fit your IoT needs.

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